The Nightfire Chronicles
by Askari Knight
Summary: Mage: The Awakening fic. A mage grows and learns about his world, the people who inhabit it, and the darkness within himself.
1. Chapter 1

A/N: So. I'm back. This is a Mage: The Awakening fic using characters based on me and some of my friends. It's rated as it is for swearing, sexuality, occasional scenes of nudity(glossed over), violence, and yada-yada-yada. I don't own the World of Darkness, nor any of the subsets that come from it. Please read, enjoy, and review as you will.

The world was murky, shaded green and brown in alternating columns of light through which specks of dust and plant life floate

The world was murky, shaded green and brown in alternating columns of light through which specks of dust and plant life floated. Distortions sent the pillars dancing across the sandy floor and a far-off sounding splash was all the warning I had, but it was enough. I twisted in place and crawled across the floor, sand scraping along my belly as I stayed as far below the surface as possible without moving into the deeper, colder and darker water.

A chance eddy against my calf made me bring both my legs up to my chest as I glanced back over my shoulder. There was the waist and legs of a large girl, and one of the blindest of the hunters without the glasses she refused to wear into the water. My lips curved into a grin as I lazily made my way around her and toward shore.

I chose not to surface until the water was about two feet deep, and even then I did so slowly, watching as the others cast about, looking for me.

Within moments of surfacing and pulling myself to a sitting position one of the others looked back and saw me sitting there, smirking somewhat as the realization that I had snuck past their defences again sunk in.

"He's at the shore," David chuckled, shaking his head. "Who'd you get past this time?"

"Cathy," I pointed at the girl. She had one of those splints on her nose used by those who had them broken. Unsurprising, considering that last week I had broken it. She had been very negative about the whole thing, even if it had been a complete accident, and I wasn't quite sure it would have been such an "accident" if she had stepped on me and broken one of my ribs.

"Freaking weird," Adam shook his head. "How do you stay under so long and move so fast?"

"I'm lazy about it," I shrugged. "I conserve my air and let momentum do most of the work."

"But still…you were under for almost two minutes, man."

"Maybe that I don't smoke helps."

"Fair enough. What's up for tonight, boys?" He glanced at Cathy. "And girl. Are we gaming tonight?" A completely different and marginally spontaneous change of direction, though not particularly abnormal for him. When he wanted, Adam could flit from topic to topic like bees between flowers.

"The overweight girl wrinkled her nose. "I've got homework and a doctor's appointment to make sure this is healing properly." Her sidelong glance at me was ignored. I had apologized once, and any more than that was a waste of words. The homework thing was a complete lie due to the lack of actual school…unless she, like myself, was taking a summer school course, but I highly doubted it.

"Sounds good," I began, running through my to-do list. Tonight was my turn to make supper, then to do the dishes, but after that I was free. "I can be ready by six…probably even be down here by then."

"Just come over to my place when you're ready," David beamed. "Mom's staying over at her boyfriend's tonight, so we'll have no interruptions."

"Should I ask if I can stay overnight?" I tuned onto my belly and sank my upper body beneath the water to protect my shoulders from the sun.

"If you can, that'd be awesome," David's smile grew broader. "Adam?"

"I'll try. Oh! Kyle's coming over tonight." My ear twitched at the unfamiliar name. "Is it alright if he hangs out with us?"

"If he can," David shrugged, stepping toward the stone steps that lead up to the grass and root-filled park known as the Point. Well, it included the swimming area as well, but it usually referred only to the dry area. "You know how your parents can be."

"Yeah…" Adam trailed off, then fixed an adoring gaze on something on the shore. With his suddenly vacant expression, I didn't need to look to see that it was directed at his girlfriend, Celeste.

"Adam!" She squealed, not unlike the sow she closely resembled. Her voice rose another octave as she ordered him to her. "Come here!"

I really didn't need or want to look, so I said to David, "You guys go on ahead. I'm going to swim another few laps across the lake." He paused long enough to nod his comprehension and say "Later." I wasted no more time and took a deep breath, then ducked my head under and swam for the other side, dodging Cathy's wistful look and legs of cellulite.

Or what I assumed was wistful. Greedy might have suited, or perhaps even desperate. It made sense after a fashion in that out of everybody I hung out with, I was the only unattainable guy, and as such I was the one she wanted to use. Fortunately for my sanity, she was not at all my type, being too big and too female.

The ladder of the dock I used as my marker suddenly loomed up out of the slightly murky water, and I jerked my head up into the air to take a gasping breath. I looked back at the intervening space between the beach and this ladder, soothing my aching lungs with long, slow breaths. It felt like it had taken less than a minute, but I shook my head and wrinkled my nose at the thought.

_I just lost myself is all,_ I told myself. Nevertheless, I swam back over and carefully ticked off the seconds. My arrival at the beach had me at just over two-hundred seconds, so almost three-and-a-half minutes. _Weird…_ Rather than complete another lap, I sluiced as much water off my body as I could, donned my t-shirt and mounted my bike and, feeling like some sort of conquering hero, returned home.

-

Dinner was a simple affair, as it always was when I cooked: sliced chicken sprinkled with a minimal amount of spices, steamed mixed veggies and a small salad with chopped apples, pear and diced green onions.

My grandmother complimented me on each part of the meal, and I gave a mumbled "thanks" for each one. We talked about what I was taking next year at the high school, what I planned to do after…just the same thing we talked about most every evening. I put the dishes in the washer and set it going, then went to ask about sleeping over at David's.

"Which one is David again?" She frowned as she struggled to remember. I wasn't worried, being as she hadn't actually seen David enough to fix him in her easy-access memory, but I knew she knew him.

"Your senility is catching up, Gramma," we laughed at that. "David's the one who wants to be a chef." No recognition. "His brother, James, works at the IGA."

"Oh, now I remember. It's alright, but you know I don't like you driving at night."

"I don't like driving either, so I'll be biking," I grinned.

"Oh, Bill, that'll be too dark for you when you come home."

"Well, that brings me to the other point." I kept my hands clasped together so that I didn't clench them into fists. I loved this woman to death, but every time I wanted to spend the night at a friend's place – and I didn't do it often – I had to weasel my way into it. "Being as it's going to be, hopefully, a good and in-depth game that I don't want to disrupt by leaving in the middle of, would it be alright if I stayed over tonight?" A little bit of guilt…

"Well…" she frowned, and I could see her wavering between acquiescence and declination. Now for some reason.

"It isn't a school night, and my homework's all done and ready for Monday," I added with as mild a tone as I could manage. Strictly speaking, I didn't even have homework to begin with, but being as my grandmother had been a teacher for a large portion of her life, she couldn't understand how anyone could not have homework every day.

"Well, alright. But take a flashlight if you do decide to come home. Just in case, okay Sweetie?"

"No problem," I grinned, then bent down and embraced her quickly. It was a sort of deal-sealing gesture, one that had evolved very nearly on its own after I moved in with her. "Thanks a bunch, Gramma. I'll see you when I get back."

It took me only a few minutes to pack everything I needed, and after I dashed up the stairs and waved good-bye to my grandmother, sitting in her rocking plush chair with a newspaper opened to the first page, I nearly ran out the front door and locked it behind me. Even if we did live out in the middle of nowhere, Gramma has asked me to lock the door behind me whenever I came in or went out, just in case of burglars. Her words, not mine.

I grabbed my bike from the garage and walked it up the sloping driveway until it levelled out, and from there I pedalled up the gravel road and followed it along to the right. At Botting Road I turned left, glancing up at the seared-wood sign that indicated what I had just come off from as being called "Lavender Lane." Keeping to the right side of the road until I passed the hill in the middle of the street, I checked behind me and ahead for oncoming cars and pulled to the left side, where I wouldn't get rear-ended and could easily see any vehicles ahead of me.

Just before Botting ended onto Bedford, I made a left onto Clearwater and passed one house, then made a quick right onto the Cataraqui Trail, supposedly a big tourist attraction for the village. Easing past the first gate, I settled into a ground-eating pace I could keep up for some time if the terrain remained flat. The crunch of gravel against my tires lulled me into a very relaxed, meditative state.

As I passed the second of the three gates designed to prevent four-wheelers from bothering residents who lived near the Trail, the trees thinned into a low, sparse brush on either side, revealing a swampy area on the right and the lake on my left.

I turned my attention back to the road in time to hit the brakes to avoid hitting the third gate. For a long time I stared at it, my mind racing. There was no way I could traverse almost two-hundred feet in just a few seconds at the speed I'd been going, and it had only taken me as long to glance to either side.

_Connected to that "lap" I did?_ Frowning, I glanced over at the lake, scratching my growing facial hair. _Time for another shave soon, I guess. Maybe Monday. I'll talk to David...he might have noticed something odd going on. Could be I'm going crazy._

"You're not 'going' crazy because you're already there," I muttered aloud. Then laughed at my own silliness. "Such a riot. Let's go, then."

It took about ten minutes to get from there to David's house, and a glance at my watch indicated it was nearly six by the time I got off my bike and stood with shaky knees and sore legs. There was a sort of long hill that most of the village sprawled off of…more like a ridge, actually, and there were two ways of getting to the top. One was to go all the way to the other end of the village, then make a sharp left turn and ease your way up that hill, which had a gentle incline. The other was to go up the way I had. It helped to think of it as a giant slice of pizza tilted forty-five degrees on one of its long sides. Either I could go along the gooey, soft and tasty side, or up the crunchy and hard crust. In this case, I'd chosen the crust, and been too stubborn to just walk my way up it.

My knees almost gave out as I settled my bike against the side of his house and my thighs burned as I climbed the steps to his back porch. I checked through the sliding glass door and found David locked in a titanic struggle with Adam.

I slid the door open in time to hear Adam declare, "And with that, I attack you with a twenty-thirteen unblockable. I think you're dead."

"Then that's game," David spread his hands helplessly and began gathering his cards. To me he said, "Hey bud. I take it your gran didn't give you as hard a time today?"

"Not really. I think she's finally getting used to the idea of me having friends for a change."

"Ha, I'll bet." He finished gathering his cards, then collected his things to go into the basement. In the middle of summer and lacking anything remotely resembling an air conditioning system, I honestly couldn't blame him. There was no problem in winter, as the furnace worked just fine.

David was halfway down the stairs when the phone rang, and Adam leapt up to get it.

"Yellow," he drawled into the receiver, then listened intently for a few minutes. "Okay, bye." He hung up. "Kyle is coming over with Celeste when his mom drops them off at my place."

"But wasn't Celeste at your house before?" I asked. "I mean, when did she go over?"

"Well man, you see…" Adam launched into a very long explanation when he could have simply said, "His mom was passing through from work and picked Celeste up, and now his mom's coming back to visit my parents, bringing them over in the process." I think he actually finished talking about Celeste's looks. Gods, that boy was smitten.

"Ah, I see," I murmured. "Well, I'm heading downstairs. Are you going to wait up here?"

"Yeah, I think so. Beats running back up the stairs again." I chuckled and made my way downstairs, praying with each step that my legs wouldn't give out from under me. That hill was a gift from hell.

The basement was pleasantly cool and I sighed with relief as I eased onto a lawn chair, taking care to remember last time I had simply plopped down on one and broken through the seat.

"So what's new?" David asked, shuffling his deck unconsciously. I pulled out mine and set it on the table. He glanced at it, then nodded. I began shuffling, thinking about what to say.

"Since this afternoon, very little," I paused to cut my deck, revealing a Doubtless One. "Four. There was a moment of weirdness. Two, actually…but the first one was subtle. Have you ever lost time?"

"Lobotomy, five, I'll go first." David drew his cards, tossed down a swamp, and motioned for me to start. "As in losing track of time?"

"As in losing it completely. As in, one moment you're doing one thing, the next you're doing something else with no memory of the transition. Plains, Ornithopter, Mother of Runes, end." I went on to describe my experiences while swimming and biking here. David was silent as we played through a couple of turns, then said suddenly, "It's been happening to me, too. But…not the same things. It's more like…I don't know how to describe it. It just feels like there's something about to happen."

"Like a big rock in a murky river?" I asked. He raised his eyebrows. "You can feel something is there because the water is acting differently around it, but you can't see it until you're almost on top of it."

"That's…one way of putting it." He shrugged and laid a card. "I can't really explain it, though. It's more a sensation that words can't describe."

"That's alright," I shrugged. "It's just weird, though. I keep track of time pretty well even without a watch, and then I start losing it? I might forget a few second here or there, but at least there's a sense of time, a distance between memories, and there was nothing in these cases. No sense of distance, no sense of time. I've looked at a few clocks and it feels like they're fast!" I shifted, agitated and beginning to feel more upset than I should have. "If I didn't know better, I'd think I was taken from one moment and plunked down when and where I'd be a minute or two into the future."

"Time travel now?" David raised an eyebrow. "It there an anomaly in the space-time continuum?"

"By all that's sacred, that's what it feels like," I muttered darkly, looking down at the game. I was outnumbered, but my defender could not be eliminated easily due to a lucky combination of cards. I wrinkled my nose, aware there was little I could do to save myself in the next turn or two.

"They're here!" Adam called down, and by mutual consent we ended the game in a "tie," packing away our cards and waiting as the others clomped down the stairs. First came Celeste, holding a character sheet that I felt certain had "minotaur" as the race.

_Perfect match,_ I thought. Next came Adam, followed by a strange guy I assumed was Kyle. From my vantage I couldn't be sure, but he looked to be perhaps five-six or seven, and slender enough to be perhaps one-twenty or so.

"Liam, this is my cousin Kyle," Adam said. Kyle raised a hand in greeting as I did the same, even as I was thinking, _They're related? Impossible!_ Where Kyle was shorter and skinny, Adam was perhaps five-eleven and built a little more solidly than myself. Where Kyle had longish, black hair and eyes so brown as to be nearly black and no facial stubble to speak of, Adam had close-cropped hair the same color of brown as mine, greyish eyes and an eight-o'clock shadow. Even their facial structures were dissimilar, Kyle's more angular and Adam's more rounded, though that judgment might have just been my observation skills at work.

The main difference was Kyle being fucking hot and Adam, well…not.

"Heya Kyle, take a seat and make a sheet," David gestured to a free chair to his left – my right - and therefore the hard-to-get-to side of the coffee table, so Kyle had to climb over the couch to get to it from the stairs. Adam and Celeste took seats on the couch beside David, but between their bouncing they drove him off to the armchair across from Kyle. I pulled out a copy of my Player's Handbook and a couple character sheets, then handed the one sheet to Kyle, along with a mechanical pencil. He quirked his lips in an expression of thanks I used very often myself.

"What level?" Kyle asked, no real direction to his query. He even sounded attractive.

"Two," David said. "Try not to take too long, though. I want to get this game going soon."

"Okay."

It took Kyle a couple minutes to finish his character, an elf druid, and soon we were happily gaming away.

A few hours later, Kyle had to go home, and both Adam and Celeste were told to get home immediately by Adam's parents, so that left David and I by ourselves. He made up a reason as for why the other characters weren't there and we made as if to continue playing. It wasn't the same, though. The momentum we'd built up deflated entirely, leaving us at a loss of motivation for playing.

"So…what now?" I asked, idly rolling a die-twenty and a couple die-sixes. "The game got made into roadkill by the truck named 'Adam's Parents.'"

"Aw, they're not that bad, dude." David stacked all his DMing books and sheets to one side, clearing a space in front of him. "Care for a game of Magic?"

"Sure," I grinned, reaching into an old CD player belt pouch I'd begun using to carry around my cards. It was kind of like a square fanny-pack. I pulled out a different deck than the one I'd used earlier, shuffled, and cut. I went first, having revealed a ten-cost "Myojin of Infinite Rage."

Two or three games later, we were still not feeling particularly tired, so we took a walk to the Point and went for a leisurely swim. That is to say, I swam and David let himself drift absently. I glanced over in his direction and suppressed a surge of sadness: his bulk would drag him down into death earlier than preferable, and I felt it ever more sharply because he was still in high school.

For that matter, so was I…albeit for different reasons. Where he had not yet completed high school, I had my diploma, but the wrong credits to do what I wanted. So now I was taking a grade ten summer school course in science to refresh my knowledge of the subject so I'd be ready for grade eleven biology and chemistry in this first semester and the grade twelve versions in the next semester. Right now I was in an odd position, being placed amongst some thirty-odd students between fourteen and sixteen. I wasn't even certain I was younger than the teacher. She could have easily been my age – twenty – or perhaps even a year younger and gaining practical experience as a teacher-in-training.

To be certain, it made me feel very uncomfortable, but I dealt with it by gloating about my victory over the vice principal of the high school. I'd been nineteen at that point, and he had no notion of when my birthday was, despite glaring evidence of it on my application form.

I relaxed on my back in the lukewarm water. It felt like swimming in cooling soup.

Slowly, I came to realize that I could not hear David anymore. He'd been talking about the game, ideas he had for other campaigns he wanted to start with or without me, and normally I'd be more attentive, but it was late and the shimmering stars seemed unusually bright tonight. A soothing breeze whispered through the trees and reeds to either side of the swimming area as I looked around for my friend. I couldn't see him anywhere that he could have realistically gotten to without my noticing, and he would have told me if he were leaving to go somewhere.

Anxiety restricted my breathing as I turned and searched. I began stumbling about, splashing as I reached with my hands under the surface. At first I found nothing, but a feeling as of my hand disturbing water near a large object changed to strands of hair trailing through my fingers. My backstroke found a human head and large, fleshy shoulders in a t-shirt. I grabbed his shoulders and strained backwards to shore, in equal parts cursing the sand giving way beneath my feet and thanking the water for its buoyancy.

Eventually I got him into the shallower water, heaving and straining until I'd dragged his bulk as far as I could go with my back pressed against the lower shelf of rock the steps had been cut into.

David's eyes stared unseeing at the stars, his lips and eyebrows arranged in an expression of surprise, and his flesh was cool to the touch. My ear pressed against his still chest found no heartbeat. I immediately began implementing what I knew of CPR and artificial respiration, mindlessly repeating the motions over and over in some vain effort to get him to respond.

It was slow, but the realization that he wasn't going to start breathing again seeped into the foreground of my mind, and I rocked back to sit in the water, staring with dread crushing my heart as my best friend slipped away. My breath came in fast, shallow gulps and my heart hammered between lungs aching for more air.

The soft glow of the stars blurred and blended, a shimmering veil above the rising treeline. What light I saw as I tilted my face to the sky seemed to shift. It formed patterns, grew brighter or dim, and colors emerged that I knew had never been seen from stars before. Greens and browns rippled across the veil, and I blinked one, slowly. No longer was I sitting in shallow water on a small beach. I stood now, blood pounding through my veins in primal music. A sudden breeze brought my immediate attention to my nudity, but the air was neither too hot nor too cold, so I paid it little mind in the face of this new place.

Through a gap in trees more vibrant than any I had ever before seen, I held my gaze on a ridge of craggy, windswept rock. Almost centred perfectly between the boughs that framed it, a rough hewn pillar of stone jutted upward from the ridge. It drew me, called to me. My bones ached with the force of it, but I remained where I was, afraid that if I moved toward it I would lose my friend.

"It may help you," the wind whispered, caressing my flesh as it gave its advice. I took an involuntary step forward, body shaking from the not-quite-need to go to the pillar. It was instinct that drove me toward it, that pushed and pulled and railed against my control.

Creatures moved beyond the trees, beneath bushes and even within the soil. Their voices joined with the wind's and prodded me on, but I dug my heels in and clutched my ears to shut the words out. But even my blood, flesh and bones joined the chorus, and it became harder to resist.

"Become real," rustled the trees.

"Live free," shrieked the birds.

"Be strong," the predators snarled.

"Be swift," the prey cried.

"Hunt." It was a command, a terrible word of power in this place. I took another stumbling step and reeled back as though punched.

"No!" I screamed at the wind. "I won't leave him to die!" I shouted at the beasts.

"Save him, then," the insects chittered.

"There is the key," another gust of wind pushed me toward the tower of stone.

"Write your Name in the stone book and you may save him," the worms murmured, writhing between my toes.

"Become your true self and you can aid all."

My next step was not at all unsure. I darted between the trees and cut through the brush, knowing even as I began my hunt for the tower that I had become prey. Wincing as the branches bit into my flesh I arrived at the base of the ridge within a few minutes, the tower looming up far above me. There was no way up this way, so I ran off to the side, ignoring the prickling sensation on the back of my neck that ran down between my shoulders like a trail of sweat.

A cave came into my view and, listening to my instinct, I dashed into it, following its twisting corridor more by sound than by sight. Nails clicking against rock echoed from below, but they sounded slow and hesitant. I exulted in escaping the one predator, only to realize that something else needed to take its place.

I burst from the cave into dazzling daylight and hurled myself to the side to duck underneath the leaping tiger. One back paw's claw clipped my thigh anyway, leaving a long and shallow gash. The tiger paused to roar triumphantly, but my only goal was to reach the tower. Need erased thought beyond what was necessary to survive and adrenaline rushed throughout my system, leaving me functioning at just above instinct. All the existed for me was to get to the tower, and the sensation that time was running out grew stronger with each step.

I evaded the tiger by winding through trees, and eliminated it permanently by ducking just before a pool of quicksand, an organism of slime that I recognized by just a slight discoloration of the ground. The tiger slipped under quickly, and I turned away from the deathtrap, murmuring "Even the ground has prey."

I rounded a thick deciduous tree and came out into open space. The tower stood before me, and its form seemed to waver between a clenched fist and forearm to a decidedly phallic shape. What didn't change was the thorny vines wrapped around it. They were stained black from the blood of others that had climbed before, and like them, I knew my goal lay at the top.

I didn't bother searching for any places with fewer thorns, simply grabbing on and lifting myself with just small grunts and gasps at the pain. The thorns tore at my flesh, seeming almost to lunge out in order to cut into my chest and belly. My genitals were no exception, but the agony would have been worse going down, and after all: flesh heals.

The pain had an unexpected side-effect, arousing me so that every movement brought the thorns to scrape across my hardened flesh, torment indescribable making it almost impossible to concentrate.

I pulled myself over the edge and crawled into the narrow opening I found there. It opened into a space much too large to sit atop this stone column…perhaps even too large for the plateau. It was at once extremely wide and almost claustrophobically confined, a paradox that defied explanation. A low-ceilinged cave whose walls were covered in countless handprints beside which names were written, I hurried through to the centre, where an enormous tome carved out of white stone sat on a pedestal.

I pressed my hand against one of my worst wounds, hissing at the pain of pressure, though the touch itself was a pleasure. When I took my bloody hand away I pressed it against the clean page of the book.

At that moment, the anticipation, the hunt and the flight, it exploded just below my belly and into an unstoppable wave of ecstasy. It hit me again and again, reward for my success, and as I stood there shuddering through the pangs of orgasm, I wrote my name in my blood, sweat and seminal fluid.

The shape of the words, the letters, they weren't quite mine, but in a strange way it was uniquely mine. Specific to me and only me, though I wasn't the only one to have such a name.

I stepped back, watching as my bodily fluids were absorbed by the book and the page was left as pristine as before. A moment later, and my eyes sought a bare spot on the wall. There my handprint appeared, followed by my name. Then the world faded to black.

When I opened eyes that I was surprised to find closed, I found myself lying in the shallow water of the lake. I remembered what I'd been doing before the weird vision or hallucination, and scrambled to sit up. David was lying where I'd left him, still staring at the stars. I touched his cheek, then snatched it back as though burned when he started choking and coughing and gasping for breath. Hurriedly I turned him onto his side and pounded on his back to get the water out of his lungs.

After a few minutes he finally managed to catch his breath.

"What happened?" His voice sounded so very hoarse, rattling as though he still had water trapped inside.

"You drowned," I said softly. "You died."

"What?!" He sat upright very quickly, corpselike in his features, with sunken eyes and pale, bloodless skin. His skin had even receded from his fingernails and hair.

"You got better," I said quickly, then we stared at each other as the context of my statement sank in.

"I died," he said breathlessly. "But I got better?"

"Looks like it," I replied, the fluttering in my stomach subsiding.

The first chuckle tore itself from David's throat, though I followed soon after, and within moments we both began laughing hysterically. We calmed down only to look at the other and set ourselves off again. Relief washed through me, making me relax as before I hadn't been.

"You look like death, you know," I said, once we managed to calm down a bit.

"You're not looking too good yourself," David replied, gesturing at my torso. Unlike him I had removed my t-shirt to go swimming, and all over my chest were nasty lacerations. None were particularly deep, but being aware of them brought pain. Apparently every injury I had sustained in the…what? Jungle? Other world? Vision? Each one was real. "Where'd these all come from, anyway?"

I stared at them in dismay, searching for a way to explain or hide them before it was time for me to go back to my grandmother's. Desperation took me as I grasped at straws. The truth was too far out in left field, and there were no real excuses I could think of that would allow me to trick her, being as she was far too intelligent for me to do so when she was focused on something. Long-sleeved shirts and pants were out of the question in this weather, and I could not possibly move without irritating one or more of them.

It was then that I felt a presence, like an unseen light just over my shoulder, a hint of sound beyond my ability to hear. Unconsciously, I reached out to it, grabbing for an option. It flooded my body and seized upon my desire for the wounds to be gone. Framed in my mind was a crude image of what I wanted to happen, or an example of it. It was a reality to be imposed on this one, one of my creation, but a minor alteration comparatively speaking.

To either side of the channel along which I reached there was nothingness, though not quite. It was an indescribable quality, similar to a vacuum except that there was something sliding around beneath the surface within it, and only my link to…wherever it was this power was coming from was keeping me from sliding over the edge. What edge, however, I didn't know…but instinct cried out that it was a bad place. I could still reach out to it, if I dared, but if I did in my newborn state I would be swallowed without so much as a ripple.

The energy, though it defied the term as an exact descriptor, took my desire for the wounds to be gone and made it reality. David and I watched as the cuts and scratches on my hands, legs, everywhere healed over quite suddenly, itching like the fleas of a thousand Arabs.

"What was…? Did I see…?" David stared at me in growing horror. "What are you?"

"I don't know," I whispered. "I just wanted them gone."

"It felt…" David shook his head and began again. "I felt you doing it. Whatever 'it' was."

"I just reached, but I don't know what I tried to get to."

"Maybe we shouldn't worry about this yet." He was breathing deliberately slowly, maintaining his composure. I felt about ready to fly to pieces, but somehow the fact that I'd been the one to cause the change, it mitigated the panic somewhat.

I frowned, but eventually nodded in agreement. "I need to sleep, anyway."

We walked back to his place, neither of us saying anything, and it was only as I was snuggling into a spare blanket that I finally asked, "Did you write your name on anything?"

In the half-light of indirect streetlights I saw a look of comprehension cross his face, mixed with remembered horror.

"At least I'm not alone," I murmured softly. "Good night, David."


	2. Chapter 2

I woke early, with the false dawn, and feeling oddly refreshed despite my slumber of a few hours

I woke early, with the false dawn, and feeling oddly refreshed despite my slumber of a few hours. Quickly and silently I pulled my t-shirt on, gathered my backpack and other things and left a hastily scribbled note for David, letting him know that I needed some time to think and acclimate.

Had there been no trees I could have seen the sun just peeking over the horizon. As it was the sky brightened in shades of pink and baby blue, blocking out the remaining visible stars and causing the moon to fade completely. The clouds were mere wisps and birds called or danced in the air. I noticed sounds that had never before drawn my attention: the wind rustling a trimmed hedge that managed to seem happy for the care it had been given, or the pavement grumbling at having a pedestrian walk on what was meant for tires.

Everything in the village seemed to have a voice underneath its regular…presence? No, not really. It was like echoes of echoes of echoes that I was hearing, and yet still not the same. In truth, it was utterly indescribable because I didn't have the words to describe the sensations…or perhaps there were no words to describe them, and they only existed as sensations. It was oppressive, however, and I needed to get out of there.

I mounted my bike and raced down the hill, sharply turned the corner and continued on at a mad dash to get home. At my nearly panicked pace it took a little more than a quarter hour for me to return home.

I stood for a few moments, collecting myself and ensuring that I didn't have the appearance of being at the edge of my nerves. It wouldn't do to worry my grandmother unnecessarily, not when I was so close to going over the edge myself.

With my bike put away safely into the garage I walked up the tree-tier wooden porch and moved to unlock the door. It swung open before my fingers could reach the handle and I found my grandmother standing there, dressed for an outing.

"My, you're home early," she said, reaching out to grab my hand. Almost as though for the first time I noticed how thin her skin was, the wrinkles and emphasized tendons stood out clearly against my hand, and my fingers could feel how delicate her flesh and bones were. "Did you and David have a falling out?"

"No," I shook my head and mustered a wan grin. "I just woke up early and decided to come home. Where're you off to?"

"Joyce is picking me up to attend a seminar in Kingston. I heard somebody coming down the driveway and figured that it might be her. The speaker is supposed to be really good. You should come." Tires crunching against gravel brought my attention to the small grey car creeping its way toward the house. "Oh, there she is now!" She waved at the car's driver, a plump, white-haired old British lady, and disappeared back into the house to get her purse. When she returned, I gave her a quick hug and watched as she got into the car with Joyce. As they were leaving, Joyce rolled down her window and waved at me.

"Bye, Billy!" I raised my hand in response and waited until they were out of sight before I went inside and locked the door behind me, breathing relief that Gramma had forgotten all about her invitation.

I didn't bother putting anything away, merely dropping my things beside the stairs and walking to the greenhouse. I cleared a stack of old magazines from the wicker couch and eased myself onto it, all too aware of its age. The furniture was very nearly as old or older than I was, and I wasn't too sure about the plants, but most of them had been here as long as I'd been coming here.

"What was last night? I asked the curtained roof, hands paused halfway through my hair. At this time of year the heat fairly well blasted into this room, and only the peachy-pink curtains kept it from broiling my grandmother's plants. I dropped my gaze to a dry-looking jade plant and thought about watering them. They seemed a little dehydrated. "Was it all a dream?"

"It was your Awakening." The female voice made me jump out of my seat and spin on my heel to face where it had come from. Nobody stood at the railing or across the dining room. "You saw the truth of reality." I whipped my head to the right and stared at the woman before me. She stood easily, though there was a quality as of awaiting the moment for sudden movement. Her short, curly hair was an interesting blonde shade considering she was black, and she looked for all the world as though she were a bad-ass soldier from a movie…except her clothing was definitely not standard issue, being made entirely from jean except for a short-sleeved, baby blue cotton shirt. Even though she didn't have any wrinkles in her dark skin there was a sense of age, and of Presence within her that made me think she was much older than she seemed. It was an unfamiliar sensation, one felt as though it stirred the hairs on the back of my neck.

"Who are you?" I demanded, only slightly comforted by the fact that I was nearly a foot than she.

"Who are you?" She replied mockingly, in a voice suddenly identical to mine. It was then she took a step forward, forcing me back. In that moment she shot up a foot, instantly reaching my height and her body reshaped itself into a more masculine form.

Me.

"That's impossible!"

"Very little is impossible," she replied dryly, returning to her first form. "My name is Ashvixen." It was impossible, but in either body the clothes had fit the frame just as much. "I claim you as student."

"Just out of the blue like that?" I straightened, gaining confidence from my height. I stared down at her and did my best to loom, no matter that she could probably turn into a three-hundred pound football player and play my spine like an accordion. She cocked a bleached eyebrow up at me and smirked.

"You do not believe me, of course. That is to be expected, and being distrustful is a good tendency for life in Awakened society, but you'll have to take me at my word for now. Your friend: the Moros. David, I believe his name is. He will have a teacher as well." She checked a watch on her wrist that hadn't been there before, and when she looked away it vanished. "Jordan should be there by now if everything's on schedule. Though I should rephrase that. 'Teacher' implies too light a level of commitment. I don't plan on hanging around that long…just ensuring that you know enough not to kill yourselves or bring the Guardians down on you. And ensure that you can be discreet. Think of me as…as a mentor."

"And you would be doing this for us…why?"

Ashvixen grinned slyly. "Successful students improve status for mentors like us. But also, as I said, so you don't kill yourselves or reveal the truth to the Sleepers inadvertently." She compressed her lips as though speaking of something distasteful. "Sleepers are the ones who haven't Awoken yet, as you were prior to last night. It means their souls are disconnected from the Higher Realms." She swept the rest of the magazines from the wicker couch onto the floor and sat down, patting the space beside her. "Sit. I don't bite if you don't."

There was little I could say to that, so I sat on the edge gingerly and jumped when she swung her suddenly bare feet onto my lap. Where had just a moment earlier been running shoes was now a pair of petite feet with wiggling toes with burgundy nails.

"Ah, now that's better. On to business, then. You, like me, Awoke when you wrote your name in the stone book atop the Watchtower of the Primal Wilds, starting you on the Path of Ecstasy. You remember that, yes?"

"Yeah," I nodded warily. "With my blood and-!" I stopped there, blushing furiously at the memory. Ashvixen grinned lasciviously.

"Don't worry; you're not the first person to shoot a load all over the stone book. Technically, all you needed was blood; though sweat, saliva, tears…any bodily fluid would work. You'd have been in the minority if you hadn't sprayed a wad at that point. It's symbolic of your…rebirth, I suppose." Her grin broadened as my blush deepened. I opened my mouth to try and say something and she used her foot to close it. "Do keep your mouth shut. You're not a flytrap." She tapped a finger against her lips. "Though you could be, though. A plant, or an animal. Or someone else, just as I was you a minute ago. Rub my feet. Do you think I put them there because they look pretty?" She snorted, but didn't say anything more until I followed her order. Under her firm flesh strong tendons worked momentarily against my hands before relaxing under my touch.

Ashvixen groaned and shifted into a more comfortable position.

"Damn, Puppy, you really are good with those hands. That Casey character was not lying when she boasted of your talents. Now…where were we?"

"Me being somebody else," I supplied.

"Shut up and listen, Puppy. No talkies." Her finger pressed hard against my lips when I opened them to complain. "You will listen and learn or speak and remain ignorant. Do you need a moment to think about the obvious answer?" I made a great show of biting my tongue, and she raised a sardonic eyebrow. "Good choice but cut the theatrics, Puppy. They may be endearing to your dear old granny, but they don't work a bit on me."

Ashvixen shifted again, cocking her head to the side.  
"First thing's first: Paradox." I stared at her, awaiting a definition. "Right. Noob." That last she muttered under her breath. "Paradox occurs when your will and the will of this reality clash: you want one thing, reality wants another, and existence is caught in the middle. I say 'this reality' because there're more than just what you can sense here. Paradox is bad. Avoid it at all costs."

"And how would I do that?" I raised my eyebrows, slowing my treatment of her feet.

"At what point do you start listening to my orders?" She held up a finger as I started to answer, and breathed deep. "It's been too long since I last had to teach someone the basics. Keep it up with those tootsies; they ain't gonna massage themselves." I began working harder, and she sighed into it. "There are two kinds of spell: covert and vulgar. A covert effect is one that isn't readily visible, or can be explained away easily. Vulgar spells are - obviously - the opposite." Ashvixen looked up at the curtained ceiling for a moment before continuing. "Sleeper witnesses upset momentary vulgar spells and can instigate a Paradox. Any ongoing effects they can detect will unravel under their scrutiny, but Paradox will not occur at that point. Disbelief is hazardous to our work."

"I…see?" My eyebrows had raised to display my confusion, and Ashvixen sighed.

"You're a willworker now - a mage. Do you know what that means? Can your sluggish brain process that bit of data?" She moved to poke me head, but I slapped her prodding finger away. All that got me was a smack upside the head. "Dost thou comprehend?" She asked in a very convincing Bette Midler voice, circa Hocus Pocus.

"Magic is all well and good in fantasy books," I started, but trailed off as Ashvixen pointed to one of my grandmother's jade plants. In accordance with her unspoken command of _watch_ I bore witness while it became nearly fluid and flowed into the shape of an amaryllis, the upper branches twisting about each other to become the main stem and the lower merging together to become a pair of long, middling width leaves. For a moment it seemed as though the growth had stopped at the point where the bud was just forming, but then it swelled and virtually exploded into a riotous crimson and pink bloom.

"I trust I've proven my point?" Ashvixen commented with a severely arched eyebrow, her dry tone adding volumes of meaning. So far her voice had been lively, almost joyful in its way…a chuckle seeming to just wait beyond the horizon. This sudden change from that to a voice without humour, possessed of thinning control of her impatience…it brought a chill down my spine. I nodded, and she glanced once more at the transformed plant, turning it back into its original form. "Good boy." Ashvixen cracked her knuckles and let a bit more of her former attitude back into her voice as she said, "We have a lot to cover and only a couple of hours to do it in. Let's get cracking, Puppy."

-

A "couple of hours" lasted until just after noon, when Grandma came back from the presentation. Ashvixen looked up from her glass of water when the sound of gravel crunching beneath tires filtered into the sunroom, and it was only by dint of having lowered the blinds earlier to limit the bright sunlight that Grandma wouldn't have noticed her.

"Listen, Puppy," she said, handing me her glass and standing up to brush invisible crumbs from her clothes. "I have to go for now, but I'll come back tomorrow if your grandmother's gone to church. After that I'll be seeing you once or twice a week for the next month and a bit. We'll talk about what we'll do after that." Ashvixen turned her head toward the door as it opened and glanced back at me with a little smirk on her lips. In a quieter voice she said, "Don't do too much practising on your own for the first week. We'll talk then." At that point she made a gesture and stepped to the side, vanishing from sight as though through some sort of door.

"I'm home!" My grandmother's voice sounded strained, but had a positive quality that indicated she'd enjoyed her morning.

"Coming," I called back, quickly piling the magazines back on the couch. One of these days we'd get them out to the recycling centre. I hopped up the three steps to the dining room and made my way to the front hall. I found my grandmother struggling to get to the kitchen with several grocery bags laden with food, and before she knew what had happened I swooped in and relieved her of them. "You know you could have just left them in the car and I could have gotten them for you?"

"Well where's the fun in that?" She quipped, kicking her shoes off. "Joyce brought me to that new grocery store near the golf course…Loblaw's, I believe."

"I think they're under the same company as the IGA," I replied over my shoulder, my biceps beginning their telltale murmurs of complaint against the groceries. I made yet another mental note to start doing some sort of upper-body workout…this one was different, though. I felt some instinct for physical betterment stir, and somehow I knew that this was not going to be another empty promise I made to myself.

"Have you had your lunch yet?"

"I made myself a chicken breast and a lot of fruit," I said, remembering Ashvixen's cool criticism of my cooking techniques and my excessive use of spices.

"Oh? How was it?"

"Really good. I should've made another for you…but perhaps I'll do that for supper."

"Oh, don't worry about supper tonight. I'm going to have a quick lie-down and get started on it when I wake up."

"Alright."

I finished putting the groceries away and went downstairs to lay in my moderately cooler bedroom and process what Ashvixen had taught me.

My fan provided a pleasant background humming noise that drowned out any other sounds I might have been distracted by, and as a constant sound I could ignore it with very little effort. There was a lot of raw information to sort through and most of it concerned what were called "Arcana." That obviously came from the word "arcane," usually a reference to something as obscure or - in some cases - secretive. Ten different areas of study that-

"_Hey, Puppy!"_

I bolted upright and looked around for Ashvixen with wide-eyes, my ears listening for the footsteps of my grandmother in expectation of her coming to ask about the sudden voice. I found nobody nearby…but the voice had sounded so close…?

"_Telepathy, you moron."_ My new teacher stated in a dry voice. _"I'm a Master of several Arcana, and though it took me a half century, I managed the same with my Inferior Arcanum. Now we have some work to do if we're going to be getting you to sling spells with the best of us."_

Acting on a hunch, I projected a thought back at her. _"Why didn't you tell me about this before you left?"_

"_I didn't think of it until after I stepped through the portal, and by then it was too late."_ I got the strangest impression that she was shrugging. _"No matter; you know now and that's all I give a shit about. Besides…this way will be easier. I can show you concepts in a matter of seconds that would take minutes or hours to explain."_

"_You've got to be kidding me…"_

"_Nobody said remaking reality was easy, Puppy. Let's get started: we have a lot of figurative ground to cover."_

A lot was right…communication was literally at the speed of thought, though it took me a little longer to process and send my responses than it did to understand hers. With no time taken up by my brain understanding the signals sent by my senses, there was only the split second it took to process meaning…and in the end it compressed the equivalent of a two-hour movie into a little less than half an hour.

While this meant the conversation moved along very quickly, after the first five minutes I begged off on the grounds that I needed to take notes. I pulled the mostly blank book of shadows I'd purchased a couple years ago when I was more deeply involved with paganism, and except for the first two pages the book was filled with clear, unlined pages a little longer and broader than a sheet of printer paper. As I skimmed over the first few pages I'd written so long ago, I felt Ashvixen watching somehow.

"_Interesting concepts, those,"_ she commented. _"They're noble principles to live by, but mages don't really buy into karma unless they've pissed off someone skilled in Fate. I only know enough of it to perform exemptions, but it's enough to give someone a really shitty day should I wish to spend the time on it."_

"_So it's not a particularly useful Arcanum, then?"_ I clicked a mechanical pencil and wrote down on a fresh page the ten Arcana and the basics of their purviews while Ashvixen considered the question.

"_Not for some people, I suppose, though there is a particularly useful effect one can cast should they Master it."  
"And that would be…?"_ I finished my outline of the Arcana and waited for Ashvixen to continue on with her explanation.

"_A Master of Fate can open Sleepers to the possibility of magic, though the side-effect is rather chaotic. Though the spell itself might incur a Paradox more severe due to witnesses in the first few moments of its existence, after that situation resolves then casting vulgar magic before the Sleepers is just like performing in front of other mages. Save for the typical dangers inherent with vulgar magic used outside a Demesne, well…"_

"_What's a Demesne?"_

"_It's a place empowered with up to five soulstones that causes the surrounding area to resonate as supernal. In other words, Paradox is not caused within the bounds of a Demesne unless a Sleeper witnesses the spell."_

"_So Demesnes are good things? And what about soulstones?"_

"_You don't need to know about soulstones yet…not beyond that they're distillations of your soul's potential and given physical form, and that it is a sin against the path of wisdom to create them. As to Demesnes…that's obvious."_

"_Why would people create soulstones if it's a sin?"_

"_Why do people steal? Why do they kill and rape and torture? It's all about power, Puppy, and mages are some of the most power-hungry out there because we have true power, and it has to remain hidden."_

I was silent for a while, writing on auto-pilot for a time while I processed what Ashvixen had said. Based on what she could feel echoing through the telepathic link from my end, she kept her information light and relatively slow in order to give me time to note it all down. When I was ready to fully attend her lesson she increased the flow, detailing aspects of the two Arcana I apparently had basic innate knowledge of based on my Path, and a third Arcanum she figured I'd enjoy learning.

"_Even if you don't like the actual educational process, I believe you'll at least enjoy the end results."_

"_I'm sure Space can open up some new venues for my prurient ways,"_ I commented dryly, finishing my drawing of the rune for said Arcanum according to how Ashvixen had shown it to me. She'd been quite correct in that she could show me things much faster than she could describe them, supplying and maintaining the mental image of the runes as she described them and how to pronounce them.

"_Oh, it could,"_ Ashvixen replied coyly. _"Wanna know what Chris is wearing right now?"_

At first I stared at the page blankly, my brain stalling as it tried to process what she was saying. _What are you…?_ My eyes opened wide as I realized what she was saying. _"Chris from Saskatoon? From Steamworks?"_

"_The same,"_ she snickered. _"You made a good choice about someone to be obsessed with; he's a hot little hamburger. An Apprentice of Space can scry - see distant people, places and/or things - and I intend to bring you to at least that degree of understanding. Hell, I'd like to get you in as part of my Legacy, but that's still some distance off."_ Questions rose up about the Arcanum, and I felt a powerful drive to LEARN kick in.

I could feel Ashvixen's amusement with absolute clarity.

These lessons continued in a similar fashion for the rest of July and into August without much difference in routine…the only major changes happening at the beginning of September - when I began my final year of high school - and midway through the month, when Ashvixen brought me to what she called a Hallow - a font of magical energy from the Supernal Realms - in order to begin practising the application of my will to bring an Imago into reality. Because my Path was ruled by the Arcana of Life and Spirit, it proved particularly easy for me to learn their basics. Casting spells was also much more efficient when crafted primarily of one of those Ruling Arcana, unlike my use of Space. Improvised casting being what it is, spells cast as such required more energy to make real due to their inherent instability. Path Arcana drew from the energy constantly emanating from the Realm my Watchtower was located in, making up the difference for improvised spells within their respective purview. The few rotes Ashvixen taught me as I grew in understanding skimmed away the rough edges of the Imagos they reflected and increased their efficiency…kinda like cleaning the moving parts of a car. It'd work if the parts were a bit dirty, but the energy consumption would be higher in order to get the vehicle moving…but clean them and remove the imperfections and the vehicle would transform energy into motion with much less wasted power, and therefore less gas used to cover the same distance.

It took me a week to be able to feel comfortable enough picking up the phone to call David and ask how he was doing. He was still a little in shock - as I was - but had acquired a teacher under much the same circumstances as I had, and was flourishing…if a little grossed out due to his study of the Arcanum of Death. Life was all biology to me…or maybe having a hunter/trapper as a father gave me a moderately stronger stomach for such things, more so than David's original vocation as a cook. Unlike David and his teacher's focus on his Path Arcana, Ashvixen expected me to practice my Ruling Arcana on my own time, working singly with my skill at Space, which was simultaneously a matter of knowing and understanding geometry…and breaking those same rules. As a result, my skills were…lacking with regards to my Path Arcana.

When left to our own devices and able to visit one another, David and I discussed what we were learning and how we figured we were progressing; without feedback from our teachers there was nothing more we could do than to theorize. Philosophical debates we avoided, both aware of our inability to create firmly established concepts due to our lack of background in the different subjects. We talked a bit about our Awakenings, but as both of us were fairly private people, neither wanted to really talk about them in much detail.

When I'd first moved to my grandma's at the beginning of the year, she had gone to Utah to visit the eldest of her four sons - my Uncle John - and I was left on my own in her rather large house for three weeks. Me being me, I hadn't really connected back with David and the others as yet…mostly because I didn't know his last name or his phone number, and it was far too cold to venture out in the snow to hike along the Trail and pop by his house without even knowing if he'd be home or not. I had him on my MSN, but I had only just gotten here, so it would take me a while to settle into my room and feel comfortable leaving and coming back.

After a few days of being alone I started to get a bit lonely - amongst other things - and went online to see who I could dig up for some…play. I'd signed into a chat room for no more than five minutes before finding someone I found interesting. He fit my preferences for body-type, his bio-line proudly stating his height as five-ten and his weight as "one-forty soaking wet." We chatted for a few minutes, at which point I invited him to drive over. I knew he was interested, but it was a twenty- to thirty-minute drive from Kingston to my place, and being late on a Sunday afternoon he wasn't entirely sure he should come over. His reasoning being that he'd have to go back to his place for his work clothes. My suggestion was for him to bring them here, so he could get ready for work here and not have to waste another twenty minutes getting home.

Suffice it to say that I managed to get him over to my place, and for the next week he went home briefly to feed his cat and change its litter before returning to me and my bed. I liked him a lot: a pliable partner in bed and…if not intelligent, then at least fun and interesting to talk to.

Four days after we'd first met, as we began to drift off to sleep together, he whispered, "I love you."

I came completely awake instantly, by sheer dint of self-control managing to resist the instinct to tense. For a long moment I considered my own feelings on the matter. From a purely physical point of view the attraction stood strongly, and we were mentally compatible. The question of whether I loved him or not still stood…but I finally decided that even if I didn't feel the same, I could learn. So I buried my face in the juncture between his neck and shoulder, breathed deep…and spoke, the lie rolling off my tongue smoothly due to my confidence in it becoming true eventually.

"I love you, too."

Fast-forward two months and we'd seen each other at least once each week. Occasionally I convinced my grandma that I was going to spend the night at his place, though it was done out of respect for her. She was aware of my sexuality and so I'm certain she could make an educated guess for at least a portion of what I was doing, but it wasn't an enormous issue because it wasn't something that was flaunted. Just something that everybody involved knew about, but felt no need to discuss.

By my twenty-first birthday - the Third of March - I'd come to the conclusion that I did care very deeply for Trevor; perhaps love him…though that was a revelation made without my usual introverted self-study of my psyche. I'd put the matter out of my mind, but while he told me a story about a particularly rude customer I was surprised by the degree of anger I felt towards that person for treating Trevor so poorly. I believe my thought at that time was somewhere along the line of _"How dare he! Trevor's MINE! I shall end that puny mortal's pathetic excuse for existence!"_ Unsurprisingly, I've always been rather possessive about what I consider mine, be it family, friends or even inanimate objects, and letting go has been a severe issue at times.

Jump farther ahead to the end of July and my Awakening, and suddenly there was an entirely new dynamic to my relationship with Trevor. Before, I'd told him almost every secret I had. From my gorging of sweets to my infatuation with Chris to my more illicit sexual proclivities, he knew all there was to know about me. And when I Awoke, I gained a secret terrible and amazing and awful to know, and it was the one thing I could never tell him. I didn't need Ashvixen to tell me a warning about the dangers of being in a relationship with a Sleeper, but she did look at me with a bit of sympathy in her eyes when I told her about my struggles with it. After half a year of absolute honesty I now had to maintain absolute secrecy…but it wasn't as hard as it could've been. Trevor understood that I had my little idiosyncrasies, so I just built on that, aware that if I reacted too visibly to something unseen in his apartment, I could simply laugh it off as one of my foibles.

I started high school in September, one last year of education in a Secondary institution before my intended destination at a college to enrol in the massage therapy program. My Awakening changed the reason for the year, and by Ashvixen's advice I switched up some of my courses, namely entering into the Academic Biology class, rather than keeping its Applied cousin. It was something I found…irritating about the Ontario educational system: most courses had two forms - Academic and Applied - and they were respectively the elderly and erudite British gentleman whose elitist attitude grated on everybody's nerves, and his retarded younger brother. Ideally, Academic courses focused on the theoretical and cerebral nature of the subject, while Applied concentrated on the practical application. The result in our flawed system was "Chemistry for Dummies" and "Learn Everything About Chemistry You Should Know at Your Grade Level and in Preparation for the Next Grade." I need not explain further.

I commented jokingly to Ashvixen a couple times that perhaps I should add a math course in order to expedite my understanding of the Space Arcanum, but she just gave me this _look_ before stating, "The geometry of the Fallen Realm and the mystical formulae required for bending the Tapestry to your whim and will are completely different areas of knowledge. Don't make me smack you for a fool."

Ashvixen didn't actually teach me how to start using my power until she brought me to the Hallow in mid-September, citing that first month of mystical education as necessary while withholding the final key to actually making my will reality until such time as she had me within a controlled area. When she finally let me in on the big secret I could have kicked myself for the simplicity of it. All the process involved was a simple effort of will…and I was still kicking myself a week later while practising spells based in either Life or Spirit on my own with as much frequency as I could, though I had to wait until Ashvixen brought me to the Hallow to try spells of Space.

"So where are we going again?" I asked in a quiet voice, leaning against the big oak tree in my grandma's backyard. Early in its existence, it had been struck by lightning or something, resulting in a horseshoe shape as it grew, though the space opened opposite the house. The moon hung high in the night sky, though it was hidden by the boughs of the oak, and the stars shone brightly. A few wispy clouds scudded across them, forerunning fingers of a larger mass of clouds coming in from the south-east. To someone who had an imagination as I did, it appeared as though the clouds were sealing away the celestial light of the stars…and that thought quickly became a metaphor for the Abyss Ashvixen told me about so often, sealing away the Supernal Realms from the Fallen World.

"We're going to a Hallow, Puppy. I've already told you a couple times already…are you truly so much older than I am that you have Alzheimer's by now?" I flipped her the bird and she chuckled. A seafoam-green luminescence lit up her face for just a moment as she checked her watch, and she nodded, gesturing to the side. I could feel…something, a whisper of a breath across the back of my neck and a ghostly sensation as of fingers trailing down my spine. "It's time." She grabbed my arm and pulled me after her, through the…whatever it was. She'd never really described it, and though I knew what it felt like whenever she worked magic around me, this didn't feel the same. It felt more, well…natural, more in tune with this world. If magic was a loud trumpet blaring out in the middle of an orchestra, this was a subtle trilling of a flute.

Whatever she dragged me through, one moment we were standing in my grandma's backyard at night, and the next the sun was shining brightly, off a pebbly beach and the air held the scent of spring and salt…even though the oncoming wind was much warmer than it was back home. The beach was surrounded on three sides by very sheer walls of dirt and stone and a vast ocean spread out before us. Having suddenly appeared here I didn't have time to become used to the sound as I would have were I riding or walking toward a beach. The pounding of the surf upon the beach was a heartbeat of indescribable strength, one I could ignore only for the sudden thrashing of my stomach. I fell to my hands and knees and quickly let loose my supper, fighting nausea to try and struggle to my feet.

"Aww, Puppy…don't tell me you get motion-sick."

"Never…" my stomach gave one last heave and I wiped my mouth with the paper towel Ashvixen supplied. "I've never had motion-sickness…but then I've never stepped through one of those before."

"A portal made by squeezing through the cracks of reality." Ashvixen shrugged. "Perhaps I'll take you on as my apprentice one of these days…I'm not getting any younger, and there aren't that many of us left…" She trailed off, pursing her lips as she looked at me. "Well, that'd have to wait until after you were inducted into the Mysterium…the order frowns on anyone teaching a Legacy to non-order members. Even if I'm no longer part of the organization. Induction will have to wait until you can cast, as well."

"And that's why we're…where?" I spread my hands and looked around.

"About thirty miles up the coast from Sydney," Ashvixen gazed at me steadily, watching my reaction.

I doubt she was disappointed when I stared at her then looked out across the ocean - the Pacific Ocean - roughly towards the Americas before returning my gaze toward her. She smiled.

"Distance is meaningless to even a Disciple of Space and above. An Adept can simply teleport wherever he or she wishes to go with no need of a portal, though to bring others a portal is usually necessary. A Master can exist in many places at once…this is basic information that I explained to you on the first day, remember?"

"Alzheimer's, remember?" After the sarcastic remark I snapped my jaw shut before I could say anything nastier. Even after a month and a half of lessons with her and learning that she preferred me to be outspoken and even mouthy at times than just some weak, mewling little kitten, I still fell back on the student-teacher relationships I'd dealt with all throughout my life. I took a deep breath and steadied myself, mentally discarding the subject of my lax brain-processing power like a bit of dust. "So where's this Hallow you've been babbling about?"

"'Babbling?'" She swatted me upside the head, and I grinned cheekily. "We're standing in it. Can't you feel it?" When I didn't answer, her lips grew into a wicked smile. "You can't, can you? I've hidden it-"

"_I've_ hidden it, you mean." The voice was sudden, male and very British-sounding, and I flinched away from it in surprise before turning to look. There stood a dour looking gentleman in a drab, grey suit complete with bowler hat and walking cane. His white shirt worked with his suit to amplify his pale face. A small pair of spectacles sat low on his nose, though when he noticed how near they were to falling off, he pushed them back up with a pale index finger before unnecessarily smoothing down one of his grey-streaked black eyebrows. It was as if he'd stepped out of nineteenth-century London.

"Ah, Jordan," Ashvixen let an actual smile spread across her face, as opposed to her typical grins and baring of teeth. "Care to remove the disguise?"

"Of course, my dear." He gave her a formal little bow, just a bare tipping of his head and upper body. It was when he made a sudden zipping gesture that I noticed his companion…a rather large young man who looked remarkably like…

"Liam!" His eyes lit up when he recognized me, and we stepped toward each other to clasp hands.

"I didn't think I'd be seeing you here," I laughed, then gasped as the sensations of the Hallow suddenly welled up. I felt more alive and real than even during my Awakening. The sun felt brighter, warmer on my skin while the ocean air was saltier and more refreshing. I felt as though by simply breathing I could take in all the power of the cosmos, and I took one long breath, nearly attempting to take it all in. My lungs ached with the effort, but still I strained…

…until Ashvixen slapped me.

"Remember to breathe, Puppy. That sensation? It's a by-product of the Hallow's resonance. You feel confident, as if ultimate power is a breath away." I stared at her, rubbing my cheek as I tried to restart my temporarily stalled brain. "Sleepers feel it too, but because their senses are closed they won't feel it as strongly. That's why we disguised it."

"Suppressed it, my dear," Jordan corrected with an attitude entirely too proper for the situation. "And as I recall, you know nothing about the Arcanum of Prime, so it was my duty to suppress it." He raised his eyes in the sun's direction, though the shade from the brim of his hat passed no nearer his eyes than the tip of his nose. "I do suggest we get in out of the sun, however. I believe if we stay out much longer without proper preparation, the Caucasians of this little party might return home a trifle reddened."

"Then I take it you're going to do the honors?" Ashvixen asked petulantly. "After all, of all my knowledge I obviously have no way of blocking the sun's rays."

"It is so good to hear you being honest about your deficiencies, my dear," Jordan smiled, then made an encompassing gesture. Metal rods sprang forth from the beach in a quartet of sandy explosions, then bent to cross in the middle. Four more bars grew from thin air and joined each of the corners, making a square with an x in the middle. And finally, a dark tarp spread across the top and draped down about two feet from each side. It let the wind flow through without impeding its path, and kept the light level down to a modicum of dimness. It was a relief after having arrived from the deep of night, and as I went to sit on the sand Jordan raised a warning finger, apparently not through with his demonstration. He snapped his fingers and a baby blue couch popped into being. As I was examining its little star-and-moon motif, a similar armchair sprang from the ground behind me, and a simple ladder-backed wooden chair across from that.

"You're lucky this is a zone known for a low-risk of Paradox," Ashvixen commented, flinging herself onto the armchair and throwing her legs over one of the arms. I gingerly took a seat on the couch close to Ashvixen, and David sat on the other end, while Jordan lowered himself onto the plain chair.

"How can I forget?" Jordan stated in response to Ashvixen's remark. "You bring it up every time I cause an effect."

"He hates the phrase 'cast a spell,'" Ashvixen told me in a stage-whisper. "Anyway, Puppy. Let's get to work. Everything that I've told you? Remember it. It's all been practice for this. I've watched you create the Imagos for a few basic effects, and I've given you the basics of your primary Arcana. Just add willpower. Let's start off with something fairly simple…"

The first spell I managed to cast - half an hour later - was Magesight using Life…what Ashvixen referred to as organic perception. She cast a few spells and had me analyze them, and as each was not exactly visible I had to tell her what they did…not an easy task at all when the world that at first seems so dead and inanimate suddenly comes alive with resonance, sounds and smells and sights that don't actually exist to my senses, but the magic causes them to be so. Everything had information just under its surface, yet it was the living creatures that I could see more clearly than anything. It was awe-inspiring, and Ashvixen needed to keep bringing my attention back to the task at hand.

When it came time to recreate the Magesight spell - referred to as second sight within this particular Arcanum by both Jordan and Ashvixen - but this time within the purview of Spirit, I was nearly overwhelmed with the sensations. The world looked almost as though it were underwater, though there were places where the fluid was just not as dense…perhaps like fog more so than water, but there was no actual detriment to my vision. That was the first thing I noticed and described to Ashvixen, and she answered by explaining it as the Gauntlet, the barrier between the Shadow and this world. Beyond that, the visual was completely different from the organic perception. Unlike the first spell, which affected just my senses, this one changed little beyond the visual of varying densities and applied the remainder of the mystical awareness to my mind. What was revealed to me was a realm of metaphor that attached meaning through symbolism in my mind's eye, providing information both useful and not. The former because it was new and part of my education; the latter because I had no clue how to interpret it.

Compared to the third Arcanum Ashvixen had been instructing me in, both Life and Spirit were extremely easy to utilize, requiring almost no effort at all to make my imagination real. When she'd said as much, she hadn't been kidding. I was only required to cast those first two spells before Ashvixen drew me into the real work. Space was…complicated. Components of it I could understand with relative easy, but drawing them together seemed to involve contradictions that cancelled out part of the Imago. Magesight posed no problem, but anything else was…difficult.

David did much the same, though with his primary Arcana of Death and Matter, though he grasped the essence of it much faster than I did. We were evenly matched for who could first finish the Common Arcanum Magesight…which ended up being Space for both of us.

A common theme through each of the three kinds of perception was the evidence that the furniture and pavilion were not exactly…real. Life revealed them as both lacking the characteristics of the sand, water and sheer walls while pulsing with a shrinking lifespan; Spirit gave me a mental image of a mask slowly crumbling to pieces; Space told me they took up a volume where they weren't supposed to whilst another dimension of some sort was gradually dwindling. Through all three lenses I could see that they were made up of energy, but beyond that I had not a clue until Ashvixen called it a phantasm, something like the mystical equivalent of a hologram a la Star Trek…but more portable.

Ashvixen drove me through a couple more renditions of the various Practices for Space, such as giving myself all-around vision, or a mental spatial map that showed me where everything was…that one gave me a headache before more than a couple minutes passed, so I dismissed it before Ashvixen could tell me otherwise. That earned me a smack upside the head, though it wasn't particularly painful in comparison with the spell.

Eventually, Ashvixen glanced at her watch and declared that it was time I got back, whereupon she hauled me to my feet and dragged me through another of her portals…only to have me throw up at her feet what little remained in my stomach under the boughs of the big oak tree.

"That first step's a real killer," I chuckled once I had my stomach under control. Ashvixen glared at me out the corner of her eye as she wiped off her feet.

"It's the inversion," she muttered. "It's always the inversion. Puppy? Next time we go there it's going to be a series of jumps. We need to avoid going somewhere where their down is our up."

"'Next time?'" I asked, my eyes going wide.

"You didn't think you knew all there was to know, did you?" Ashvixen gave an evil chuckle. "I'll be seeing you in a few nights…look for a rose-red envelope beside your fan for a specific time."

"Alright," I turned to head back to the house, but stopped and gave Ashvixen a powerful hug. "Thanks for all your help."

"I ain't through with ya yet, Puppy," she replied, patting my head despite my being nearly a foot taller than her. "Now get some sleep. You've got a test tomorrow that you don't really want to be failing…not with that hunk of a Philosophy teacher watching." She gave me a wink, pushed me toward the house, and vanished. Unlike the other times, she didn't create a portal to step through…she just disappeared without moving, and I did as she said.

That was the mental part of the pattern we followed for the next year. She'd take me to that Hallow in Australia to practice without need for spending my personal resources…or sometimes she'd bring me to one in Germany or British Columbia. The physical aspect of the pattern lay within Ashvixen bringing me to some twenty-four hour gym in Britain that was held and maintained by the order of Adamantine Arrows. I spent each evening of a three-day period engaged in two hours of vigorous physical activity - be it either in the weight-room under her direction or engaged in combat training with actual Adamantine Arrows or being "hunted" by Ashvixen in a parkour-based game of Tag. With advice on her part, I also learned how to manipulate my metabolism, and so responded much more rapidly to the program than I would have without her assistance. In December she took me on as her apprentice - someone to follow in the footsteps of her Legacy, a crowd known as Sneaks, or Reality Stalkers - and for my birthday in March she decided my "incubation" period was complete and I was inducted into her order - the Mysterium - alongside David. From there until the end of the school year we were taught the concepts behind the Mysterium's role, its goals, rotes and the rudiments of the language of ancient Atlantis - mere fragments that were referred to as High Speech.

I maintained my relationship with Trevor, though at times it became strained because I couldn't spend as much time with him as either of us wanted. My plans for college and a following career as a massage therapist had to be scrapped, though I didn't abandon the course, seeing the program as another way to learn about biology.

David and I worked together as much as possible, growing familiar with each others' magical styles even as our friendship grew deeper, into something of a brotherly affection. When we "graduated" beyond basic training we continued to practice our skills together, sometimes practice on each other.

Since the Mysterium could reach me at virtually any time and I could travel to them whenever I wished, they allowed me to live my life as it had been…for the time being.

In August I moved to my dad's and worked for him as a means of getting a bit of pocket money for at least the first few months of college. Essentially, for two weeks I helped him take logs and turn them into boards, gradually transforming the backyard from a depot of logs into something that vaguely resembled a lumberyard. Since we only worked mornings to avoid the heat, I had afternoons and all of the last week off for myself to do as I wished, and I spent it swimming in the rapids of the river that ran through Petawawa. In that way I became more accustomed to my Life-based magic, healing the little bumps and bruises I would have otherwise gotten from missing a handhold or swinging too far out along an eddy. As reward for maintaining a minimum grade of around 75, my dad bought me a laptop, something I'd expressed interest in as a means of portable entertainment, though to him I made mention of my gratitude at having such a good studying device…regrettably, possession of the computer led to my ensuing World of Warcraft addiction.

At the end of the month I moved into the residence at Algonquin college and a week or so after that I began my classes in earnest. Regrettably, I spent more time obsessing over my magic - and playing a certain online video game that shall remain anonymous - than studying and sleeping at regular intervals, so when the semester exams came around in December I bombed somewhat.

Okay, a lot. As in…all F's except for a B in one class. I failed the English class, which kinda blew me away…it took a special kind of disinterest to fail a class I had previously achieved high-80s in.

For the next few months I cloistered myself away in my dorm room, grateful for the modern construction of the building that allowed each student to live with another in a two-bedroom apartment. The only problem that I could see was the lack of personal stoves, but perhaps the full-size refrigerator in each kitchenette, free cable television, unlimited local phone calls and personal voicemail, unlimited internet access and hot water had sapped the budget by just a bit. It was fun there, though due to the direction my window faced and my tendency to drift toward a thirty-hour day schedule I ended up covering the window with a large number of black garbage bags.

My parents never really joked when they called me a mole.

Ashvixen kept coming to visit all throughout the school year, usually to drag me off to an hour or two of training in the British gym, be it as simple weight-training, or actual fighting exercises. She was a very firm believer in being able to defend oneself, especially if you found yourself bereft of magical assistance for any reason. I didn't really care for the weight-room, but I lived for when she brought me to the combat training centre. It helped a great deal that most of the people I practised against were…if not exactly hot looks-wise, they were at least physically attractive.

On the fourth of March - after having reconnected with Chris through email at the beginning of the college school year - I wove a portal to Victoria, British Columbia and spent a week visiting, staying with him in his little apartment a block away from the beach. When I came back home, I decided that I couldn't torture myself with illusions of him and I ever having some sort of happily ever after, or even a mediocre version thereof. The secrets I kept could…trouble him, if not outright damage the relationship. As I've always preferred of full disclosure to someone I choose to seriously date, being with Chris just…wouldn't really work out. It would take time, but I would eventually work through that.

Near the end of March - after three months of hiding from most of the rest of the world - I finally got hold of my senses and moved into my sister's apartment across town, and a couple weeks later I even managed to get a job at a Loblaw's that was perhaps ten or twelve blocks away from the residence, and an hour ride on a bus - one-way - from the apartment. I finished moving my things over to my sister's before too long, using a portal created to last just long enough for me lunge across and transfer the rest of my possessions over.

In July I quit from the Loblaw's, citing my reason as the trip was far too long for me to get there, and a month later I got a job at the little grocery store about two blocks away from the apartment, a dinky, dingy, dirty little place called Price Choppers. Management sucked, and the pay was minimum wage, so after a month of that I picked up a second job working at the Mac's…which was even closer to home than the grocery store. By the middle of November I quit my job at Price Choppers and took on Mac's as a full-time job, enduring the change of management in early December and my subsequent placement into a permanent night-position.

It was…different.


	3. Chapter 3

Staring mindlessly at the glowing monitor of my laptop, I breathed deeply and tried to relax

According to Ashvixen, most Canadian cities weren't known for having a particularly high density of supernaturals, although Montreal, Toronto and Edmonton had the highest population…comparatively speaking. Ottawa had perhaps a hundred or so overall, but they usually stuck to the seedier neighbourhoods in order to avoid the areas where police were most active. Working the night shift meant I met significantly more such beings than if I'd worked during the day. The majority were vampires, seducing mortals with convenience store food and smokes. They were easy to detect because they didn't register as alive when I maintained a spell that detected living organisms. I didn't like surprises, so for the first few weeks that I worked I kept it up with a Space component worked in that pin-pointed anyone within the area of effect. I was…intrigued when one of the customers a little after midnight came in without my being aware, and the only time I realized he was there was when he cleared his throat at the counter.

I knew about mages - being one that was only logical - but this one…he interested me, and in a way he scared me. It would've taken powerful magic to cloak his vitals from my detection spell, but I couldn't sense anything like that coming from him.

"Package of Peter Jackson, light-king," he said, and as he had a bit of grey hair I decided not to ask for ID, but as he handed me the ten-dollar bill I grabbed his wrist on an impulse and felt as though my skin were trying to draw away from the touch of his cold, clammy, pulse-less flesh…despite it being a rather warm autumn night. His eyes narrowed and he flipped his hand to try and break my grip, but with me being a rather large fellow and him relatively small he was unable to get free. He paused for a moment and I felt little prickles along my spine, like insects walking up and down it, and in the next moment as he moved to try and get free I released his wrist. "How dare you!"

"What are you?" I asked as calmly as I could. By all I knew, this man could not exist. "You're not alive, that's for sure." His eyes opened wide and he glanced at the door, then at the security camera above and behind me. "Don't worry about that; just answer my question and you can go peacefully."

"And if I don't?" he asked, a little more composed.

"Call it intellectual curiosity," I smiled sweetly. "I've seen your face, I've touched and I've spoken with you. That's enough of a sympathetic connection for me to track you down."

"Mage," he growled, clenching his hand on the bill. Realizing what he'd done, he thrust the bill at me. I took it gingerly and finished the transaction, handing him his change and waited patiently as he struggled with the decision. Finally he twitched his face into a snarl and said, "I'm breaking Masquerade if I tell you, but it's already broken anyway. I'm Kindred."

"Explain," I commanded in a warning tone of voice.

"I'm a fucking vampire, alright?" He snatched the pack of smokes and made for the door. "Jesus fucking tap-dancing Christ, can you be any nosier?"

As the door closed behind him, I rested my chin on my interlaced fingers and murmured thoughtfully, "You have no idea."

The next kind of supernatural to come in was a werewolf, though I didn't know what she was beyond someone with a spirit following behind her. I was vaguely aware of its presence, just a tingling along my arms and legs, and watching through a spiritual lens I saw the being. As she came up to the counter with her little carton of milk and package of bacon she noticed my attention being drawn over her shoulder repeatedly, albeit as discreetly as I could manage. It took less than a moment for her to realize what I was looking at, and her casual indifference became earnest interest.

"You see it?" she asked, eyes alit with curiosity. I raised my eyebrows quizzically, and she tossed her head back, toward the spirit. To that, I nodded, and she grinned broadly. "Wonderful! Have you met anyone?"

"I meet new people every night," I answered carefully, and she threw back her head to laugh. In many ways, this attitude reminded me of Ashvixen with her openness…but my teacher had a somewhat more secretive nature befitting a mage.

"Good answer, but I meant 'have you met anyone of the People?'" My puzzled expression gave her the answer she was looking for, and she nodded. "No, then. Well, now you have. Michelle Bleau, Irraka Hunter in Darkness." She held out her hand and waited expectantly. I took it and introduced myself after a moment of hesitation.

"Liam Burrell, Mysterium Thyrsus." As soon as the words left my mouth I knew I'd said something she did _not_ want to hear.

"Aw, fuck," she wrenched her hand free of mine and cursed for a good five minutes before glaring at me. She scared away three customers during her little tirade. "You tricked me!"

"You assumed," I retorted. "You never asked if I was one of 'the People,' whatever those are."

"Werewolves, Uratha," Michelle snarled, her hands clutching convulsively as though she wanted to wrap them around my throat and squeeze until my head popped off.

"Now I know your secret, and you know mine," I shrugged, filing away her name and face away for later recall…perhaps prurient sight-seeing, as well. She was attractive in her own way. "I don't think that's call for violence. Let's call it an even exchange of information and leave it at that, hmm?"

After a few moments she nodded curtly, and I rang her purchase through. "You're aware that this is a secret? That means you don't tell a soul." I felt the corner of my lips twitch. This woman wanted to tell me about secrets?

"I'm perfectly aware of that," I replied calmly, handing her change back. "Your secret is as safe with me as mine is with you." I stared her straight in the eye, confident in my ability to take whatever she dished out, but just to be certain I shored up my body's physical structure with a Shielding Practice of Life. "I'll be watching, Michelle." She narrowed her eyes, grabbed her purchases and nearly ran out the door.

Throughout the months during which I worked there, I encountered many such individuals: vampires and werewolves and even a few mages stopping in for a pack of smokes or bottle of Gatorade.

It was an educational time. Mages in particular looked at me oddly, but said nothing because I didn't. I refused to wear my order-affiliation on my sleeve, and was relatively curt with the few mages that made any effort at stirring up a conversation. My typically antisocial attitude worked well in putting them off, as I didn't much care to involve myself in their politics. I caught glimpses of it the few times I'd attended a Meet of the Consilium, and it disgusted me as much as Sleeper politics did, if not more. We're supposed to be enlightened beings, yet they squabbled over minor things.

For the most part, my order left me alone…though they did bring me in every so often with their little "requests."

Such a request was actually put through in the form of a letter addressed to me in a delicate, flowing script that no man had ever replicated. The return address was a post office box somewhere in Toronto, a place I'd been only briefly about a decade ago. The envelope even had the marks from the Postal Service that indicated it had passed through such lines, and I wondered for a while why they hadn't just teleported it into my room. Ashvixen could do it, but only because she had a measure of knowledge of Matter. I was limited to transporting basic life-forms, like insects, plants and fungi, and other such micro-organisms…but it was something I didn't find necessary to rectify.

When I got into my room I had answered the "why?" question with "because I warded the building, and teleporting it would have breached said ward and been the height of rudeness." That question answered, I replaced it with a "how?" As in, "How did they get my address?" As far as I knew, Ashvixen didn't know it, though she could just simply drop in on me, ward or no ward. Being my teacher automatically meant that I had no privacy, apparently. Fortunately, she wasn't quite that bad, and I only had to repair the damage she caused to my ward every other week.

Once in my room I slipped out of my work clothes, hung up the shirt and tossed the pants in the laundry basket, and pulled on some red and black swimming trunks that had seen better days. The letter sat on the closed lid of my laptop, an almost palpable presence tickling my spine as I finished changing…which led to my donning of Magesight in order to determine if there was anything enchanting it that I should be nervous about. After a few minutes of examination I finally decided there was nothing there that I could see, but that didn't mean there wasn't anything at all. The more potent a spell, the better it blended into reality and therefore the harder it was to detect. If I wanted to spend a few hours casting, I could probably augment my Magesight enough to detect anything somebody really wanted to hide, but that was more time-consuming than simply reinforcing my body and opening the envelope.

The letter was written on one page that had been evenly folded in three sections, and the script was a fast, slanted handwriting that loosely resembled my own, now that I had a larger sample of it to examine.

_Dear Liam Burrell,_

_It has come to our attention that you have not yet been handed an undertaking for our Order. As we are aware of your status as a Disciple of Space, please find enclosed a photograph of the location you may use as the exit point for your Portal._

_We need not stress the importance of secrecy, so for security reasons please destroy this letter and the envelope it arrived in, and bring the photograph with you when you arrive. It is certain that you won't require it to return home._

_Do come properly prepared. This means proper clothing and basic hygiene products. Please pack light, otherwise._

_We expect your arrival to be timely and no later than noon of the date you receive this letter._

_We are watching._

_In pursuit of knowledge,_

_Amselle Nova, Mystagogue_

I sat on my bed for a while, eyeing the accompanying photograph. It was very high quality, a necessity when building on a sympathetic connection of such previous inexistence. With care I mentally poked and prodded, examining the new thread of a connection to determine its strength. It was fine, almost nonexistent and difficult to see. But knowing it was there allowed me to weave a stronger, thicker thread more able to channel sympathetic magics. In my mind's eye new threads spun out from me and braided around the original thread. The process was slow by my standards. If I had my druthers it would have been done in the span of a heartbeat, but sometimes the magic wasn't potent enough to strengthen the sympathy, and it only became harder the stronger the thread became. This was a necessary step in creating the portal there…it would otherwise take me several hours more to create the portal. However, this exercise only improved my sympathetic link; it didn't give me the experience of ever having been to the place.

Once I was finished, I stripped off my work-clothes, grabbed a towel and wrapped it around me before grabbing first a glass bowl from the kitchen then a pack of matches and the letter from my room. In the bathroom I shredded the letter to pieces and dropped a few in the bowl, igniting them and letting them burn before adding a few more pieces. The smoke was…heady and oddly relaxing, but the fan ventilated the room and kept the smoke from building up. I rinsed the bowl out into the toilet and stepped into the shower, marvelling - as always - how lean I'd gotten under Ashvixen's rough training. It gave me the energy and drive to maintain it much better than anything I could've done on my own, something that had always given me problems. I mean…I had abs! Just a tiny little two-pack at the moment, but I was already starting to see the development of another pair. My job wasn't particularly labour-intensive, and I was surrounded by junk food eight hours out of a day, so I had to work that much harder on the DDR mat in order to burn the extra calories off. Too much magic could make my body dependent on my conscious mind for regulating my metabolism, a risk Ashvixen had emphasized when teaching me how to do it.

I finished up the shower and dressed in a pair of beige cargo pants and a dark, loose t-shirt worn under a significantly bulkier sweater with a hood. One of the pockets held a tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush wrapped in a plastic sandwich bag, and another held a little Swiss Army knife. I looped a fanny-pack around my waist and went through a mental checklist to ensure I had everything. At that point I remembered my boots and my knife: a single-edged combat knife the likes of which was used in the Soviet army or the Marines, it was also the third-place prize won at a beginner's level competition held by the Arrows. They called it a utility knife, but I couldn't see any real use for it combat situations. I stowed it in the pocked on my left thigh; normally too small for a foot-long weapon and sheath, a quick effort of will expanded the volume within to accommodate it. Into the pocket on my right thigh went my tarot deck and a small bloodletting razor, both of which were useful for ritual-casting, albeit for different reasons.

Satisfied, I left a note for my sister stating that I was going over to a friend's place for the night, I grabbed my gloves, left and locked the apartment and walked to the bus-stop. When I'd moved up here, Ashvixen had visited and brought a map with the locations of several known Hallows, and who she thought controlled them. There was a very weak one in the Parliament building, but finding an out-of-the-way place where I could basically sit for an hour or two would prove nearly impossible there. There was another of middling strength over in the Kanata district, but it was zealously guarded by a cabal of mages who wanted nothing to do with the rest of the world than to just be left alone. They were firmly established and the borders of their territory were warded and alarmed against supernatural intruders in an intricate web of Space Arcanum spells that I would have killed to study.

Gatineau was mostly a magical dead zone, an unsettling place but for one location on the far side: a disturbingly powerful Hallow with an extremely focused field of effect. I had no idea who the controllers were, but being as it was located in Quebec territory I wanted nothing to do with it.

Other than those three, there was another Hallow on top of the RBC building in the downtown area, and another few minor ones held by little cabals in the outlying areas of the city to the south and east. Fortunately, I didn't need to accrue favours with any of them, as there was an unmanned place in the middle of the Hurdman Park that I could use. Ashvixen knew about a lot of such Hallows, and the only reason the Mysterium was so ignorant as to their locations was her claim that she was collecting data on the locations of all the Hallows she could find, to be delivered to whoever was the fearless leader of the order at the time of her death. In my opinion, she had her own little agenda, but as long as it wasn't inimical to the order I saw no reason to enlighten them to things they need not know about…especially when some of Ashvixen's activities were frowned upon by the Mysterium, so say nothing of the actions they knew nothing about.

I switched buses at the St. Laurent mall bus station, got off at Hurdman station and walked on toward the park by crossing the bus lane and hopping the low fence. This landed me in a field untouched by paved sidewalks, and I walked on, unmindful of the chilly early winter wind. The surrounding grasses were browning and frost-limned, and there were a few patches of snow from last night's snowfall.

Once I crossed into the tree line a hundred meters or so from the fence, I immediately felt the resonant calm of the Hallow surrounding me…a sensation more a matter of concession to inevitability than actual serenity. I listened carefully for anybody else before then staring at the photograph to built an Imago for the second step of the exercise. When I bent my will upon the mental construct, the photograph and surrounding world and sounds faded substantially, to be imposed upon by a view of the room. From my perspective I stood in the center of the place, but it was as if I was seeing every direction at once, a full sphere of vision that caught everything.

A square room, it had no windows, and only the only furnishings were three long benches against the three walls flanking and opposite the door. The floor was tile, but cunningly crafted to appear as old wood, and a wall-to-wall mat placed before the door inferred they were used to guests popping in from remote regions with mud and other things on their boots and/or shoes. The walls were stained dark brown until about midway up, where a border of a lighter reddish-brown carved with Atlantean symbols encircled the room. The motif was repeated against the doorframe, the sideboards near the floor, and a pale greyish-brown border near the fully grey ceiling. Between the ceiling and mid-wall border it was painted in such a way as to suggest a bird's eye view of waves…or perhaps wind from any angle. It was lit by…nothing. The light seemed to come from everywhere without any actual source of light, and upon a second reading of the runes carved into the three borders I saw the symbols for the Arcanum of Forces, light, and permanency in a repeating pattern all around the room. Other than that last detail, there was nobody inside, and at that point I began to build my portal. While it wasn't necessary for me to do the work in a Hallow, I preferred not to spend resources I didn't have to.

Ashvixen would have simply teleported in, or perhaps created a portal and stepped through without more than a cursory glance at the photograph and maybe the same sympathetic-strengthening I'd performed, but I found it much easier to build a door to a place I could see. As I didn't really have time to build a portal, go someplace and do whatever, and then build another portal to come back, I wasn't as practised with the mental pictures of places as I could have been. Most of my spells were focused on me or the immediate area I could see, and only rarely did I do anything that meant having to look farther a-field, though typically it was checking up on one family member or another.

An hour's worth of effort later I stepped from the little copse of trees into a room whose designer spent painstaking effort on detail and utility. As my other foot settled on the tile floor the portal closed behind me, and I had a way back to the park if I could return to this room. Having arrived home at about half-past seven and left for the bus a little before eight, I was here well before noon. The air here was warm and cedar-scented, but that didn't tell me much. I strode over to the door and wiped my wet boots on the mat before trying the handle. It was locked, so I knocked a couple times and waited.

Nothing.

I sighed, looked around the room and noted that the benches were bolted down. I sniffed at that and turned back to the door, placing a few fingers between the doorjamb and the knob. Since the door opened away from me, the hinges were on the other side of the door and that meant I couldn't, I knew a few tricks for getting past that. At my degree of education regarding the Space Arcanum - Disciple - it was possible for me to increase the volume of an object - like a pocket or a bottle - without altering the outside dimensions. I got the idea for trying it from a Dungeons and Dragons manual, perusing the spells within and comparing them to what I could do, just for a laugh. The result was useful. Since I could increase the volume of an object, what stopped me from doing the opposite? In this case it was a drawn out process, a matter of warping the spatial axes of the hole the latch fit into, shrinking it until it was flush with the rest of the doorframe. This pushed the latch into the door, and I pressed against it with my two fingers. The wooden panel swung free with a _click_.

I spared barely a glance at the warped hole before releasing the spell. It was an optical gut-churner that still made me feel sick to look at, but the hole was back to normal. Stepping out into the hall, I closed the door behind me and set about picking a direction.

A similar motif as the destination-room flowed along through the hall, although the floor was actual wood with a burgundy carpet covering the majority of it, and the borders of the floor and halfway up the wall were both smooth. The light came from fluorescent lights mostly hidden by cases that ran along either side of the ceiling, though the light was allowed through by a half-foot opening just by the roof. This effect softened the typically harsh light of a fluorescent bulb, keeping the hall at a level of light similar to just before twilight.

Unlike the destination-room, the unrelieved painted flows upon the walls were interrupted by large paintings - none of whom I recognized - with bronze plaques beneath them. I scanned through a couple and found nothing but mundane subject matter…who and what they were to the Sleeper world. What was interesting was the border of each of those plaques was made entirely of Atlantean symbols, describing its subject's mystical accomplishments. Sharon Nightsfold was a Master of Mind and Forces, and a dabbler - Initiate - of Space, despite that she walked the Path of Scourging, Mastigos. She subdued a powerful daemon some fool beginner had been overconfident and stupid enough to summon, and was slain by its counter-strike. Merrick, an Obrimos Mystagogue and Adept of Prime, Forces and Spirit; known for his half-dozen familiars and negotiating a treaty of mutual agreement with the werewolves of San Francisco back in 1973, and died of a scorpion sting in Egypt in 1974. The details weren't that well-written however, being as knowledge of High Speech was not particularly great. It was like reading the writing of a child who'd never learned verbs or punctuation.

I read on and on, losing track of time despite my efforts at the start to get in the habit of looking at my watch after reading each painting. I'd only read six plaques - due to my needing to sound out the runes in order to get the actual meaning of a glyph, and even then only after a few moments of study of each - when I heard the first knock at the door to the destination-room, I glanced at my watch and found it nearly noon. Grimacing at the lost time I glanced at the room and gazed through a crack in reality, just as Ashvixen had taught me. Having just been in the room it was easy for me to see within, and when I saw them I threw open the door just as shadows coiled up from the base of the door. I stood face-to-face with David, though he stood in a pool of inky darkness, dissonant with his companion's lack of shadow. He saw where I was staring and shrugged, the shadows disappearing immediately.

"I got an upgrade," he commented with quirked lips. I responded with my own grin. The last time we'd worked together he'd only been able to manipulate the depth of existing shadows and their direction, but his attempt to open the door and the creation of tangible darkness from nothing spoke of his increased degree of skill within the purview of the Death Arcanum.

"Good for you," I smiled, undoing my belt and slipping it free of a couple hoops on the right to hook my knife's sheath onto it, then did my belt back up.

"How about you? Any new advancements?" He eyed me, as though trying to size up my knowledge by some mysterious visual cue. I shrugged.

"I haven't put that much effort into mystical development," I replied, adjusting my shirt and fanny-pack. "I'm a -" at that point I spoke the High Speech words that identified me as a second-degree practitioner - Apprentice - of the Arcanum of Spirit. "But I've been concentrating more on my martial abilities."

"Then you two are well-suited for this mission," the musical voice with a hard edge came from behind David. I looked to see a tall woman with straight black hair pulled back in a tight ponytail wearing a dark blue business suit and a cream-colored blouse standing in the doorway to the destination room. "But you won't be going alone." She checked her watch, a surprisingly cheap piece of tech that appeared to have been purchased from the Dollar Store. "In fact, they should be arriving now." I looked over her shoulder and watched as the terminus for a portal appeared, a slash of light that sprouted from the ground, extended straight up seven feet, then drew apart like elevator doors. Though the basic effect of the spell was the same, it seemed that when different people created a portal the visible effect was different. An example being that my portals were oval or circular and opened from the centre, creating a reality-distorting effect at the edges. This one was just bordered with the same bright light present at its creation.

Through it I could see the other side of the room faintly, with another image of someplace else superimposed over that, though on the opposite side they'd only see through the portal, evidence of its accessibility. It was a jarring effect, and I had to turn my eyes away to quell my rising nausea. When I felt the power of the spell dissipate I glanced back up, only to have my eyebrows try to find their new home in my hairline.

Four people stood there, two of them calmly, as though they'd seen the room before and found nothing special about it. The other two gawked at the room somewhat, and were very familiar…

Mitch wore an old winter jacket of some dark color I couldn't quite identify although he left it open to account for his formidable bulk. His hair was still maintained in a buzz-cut, and he appeared to still favour casual clothing. A sports-bag I remembered him using in high school hung from one shoulder, and otherwise he looked pretty much the same. Him, David and I knew. The other I alone recognized, albeit after a moment.

After I moved to Regina to live with my mom in the summer of my sixteenth year, I started Eleventh Grade at the local high school and by some time in November had befriended another guy a year younger than I. We'd played games of Magic: The Gathering in the back room of the school library - with the librarians' permission, of course - and otherwise kept each other sane through such games; my years in elementary and secondary schools were lonely, a habit of mine arising from being born to a military family that moved around a lot kept me from making friends to avoid the pain of separation. Because I had actually thought I'd be staying in Regina for some time - silly me - I reached out for him, and the hand of friendship was returned. Last time I'd seen him he'd sported hair just a little longer than Mitch's, and struggled to grow any sort of facial hair. Now, however…

Daniel stood, as usual, shoulder-height on me, and probably weighed half what I did…if he was lucky. Unlike my short-lived career as a high school wrestler, he'd continued on into his university years and this gave him a solid build, lending additional mass to his otherwise spindly frame. His hair - a lighter shade of brown than mine - was long. That's the first word that came to mind. Never before had I seen him with bangs that could veil his eyes or hair that could cover his ears down to his jaw-line. His eyes were a lighter shade of blue than I remembered, but otherwise he hadn't changed much physically. He wore a light-coloured windbreaker and blue jeans, and he carried a black and grey backpack on his shoulders.

For a moment he stared at me blankly, and I could almost hear his thoughts as he wondered why I looked so familiar. Recognition lit up his eyes, so we took a couple quick steps toward each other and clasped hands, grinning. We didn't need words, instinctually understanding how glad one was to see the other, and vice-versa.

Somebody coughed behind me, and when I turned I saw David waiting on an explanation.

"David, meet Daniel, my friend from when I went to high school in Regina," I turned to Mitch and swept my hand from him to David. "Daniel, this is Mitch and David, friends of mine from Sydenham."

"Nice to meet you," David said, smiling and taking Daniel's proffered hand. Mitch did and said the same, proving once and for all that civility was in his nature after all.

"I'm honestly surprised to see you here," Daniel said to me after the introductions were complete. As when I'd last spoken to him, his speech impediment was fairly pronounced. When he was in his formative years he'd had a build-up of fluid in his ears, eventually resulting in his words sounding like he were trying to pronounce them underwater. Any soft "r" sounds came out as "uh", and "L" was less sharp when in the middle of a word than when at the beginning. Otherwise he was intelligible and it truly was a minor point of interest.

"I didn't expect to find you standing here, either." I shook my head and gave a faint smile. "The assumption is that you've Awoken?" Daniel nodded.

"Me too! Me too!" Mitch waved his hands, acting a bit like in high school, but his expression became serious soon enough. David glanced at him curiously, and Mitch added, "I Awoke to the Tower of the Iron Gauntlet."

"I walk the Path of the Mighty," Daniel said.

"Iron Coin," David put in for Mitch and Daniel's benefit. I stated my own as well.

"Thyrsus."

"Well, now that you've all caught up with a considerable waste of time," the black-haired woman began, arms carefully made to hang loose, rather than cross them as I'm sure she wanted to. She couldn't stop her fingers from tapping against her hip, though. "Introductions are in order. I am the Senior Reclamation Officer, Jetta Onyx. These two are the Censors you'll be working with." She gestured at the last two, a man and a woman. He wore casual clothing similar to mine, but his belt had significantly more equipment attached to it than just a combat knife. She had on loose, breathy clothes that flowed around her body and shifted a little even as she stood still. Both were similar in height and coloration, the only difference in that respect being his hair was cut short and hers shaved off completely. "He is Tay Renee, and she is Serena Renee."

"Twins," Serena stated in a curt explanation, sweeping her ferocious stare over us. "This is quite surprising, Jetta. I had anticipated aides with a modicum of experience under their belts. Is this what we are to expect in this mad exploration you send us on?"

"Peace, Sister," Tay waved a placating hand at her. "At least they didn't choose to saddle us with Arrows again."  
"We're standing right here," Daniel muttered darkly.

"Why are we here, Jetta?" Asked David, his face carefully composed into a mask of deceptive calm. His hands clasped in front of him showed white at the knuckle, revealing his irritation at being left in the dark.

"You were assigned to assist them in the retrieval of an Atlantean artifact from a team of Guardians trying to destroy it. As I'm sure you're well aware," Jetta swept her gaze across us and raised a manicured eyebrow. "Mysterium law prohibits the destruction of any artifact or other object connected to the Mysteries, instead relegating the dangerous and/or unknown objects to various locations for safekeeping."

I glanced at the Censors and scratched my newly-shaved beard. It was already starting to itch. Serena flicked her eyes at me and raised her eyebrows, asking "Do you have fleas, Boy?"

I pursed my lips and cocked my head to the side, as though mulling the question over. After a moment I shrugged and quirked the corner of my mouth - as though holding back a grin - before proceeding to visibly ignore her. If she wanted to try and goad me, she was welcome to try…but my temper for such petty insults had settled quite a bit since I Awoke. A lot of things changed…

As Jetta explained the mission - where they'd last been seen, suggestions on where they were heading, blah blah blah - I considered the two Censors. Within the Mysterium they, and people like them, were the ones who took information and packed it away if it was too dangerous or sensitive. That included any Supernal objects of power. Nothing was ever destroyed unless absolutely necessary, instead hidden away from the temptation to use it. A wise course of action, but reluctance to destroy something could translate into hesitation at a critical moment.

"What did they take?" The question was sudden, and it took me a moment to realize that I'd asked it. Jetta stared at me, dark eyes glittering like her namesake. After a moment she nodded curtly, and gestured to the wall. Magic was woven, and a square television screen five feet on a side appeared, obviously a phantasmal construct of Prime. It flicked on and a worn book appeared against a grey background. It hung in midair without any visible support, and after a moment it flipped open and slid to the left, allowing space for a list of gibberish to rise on the right-hand side, passages in various languages with numbers and whatnot interspersed throughout. Occasionally I caught a glimpse of what looked like an Atlantean glyph, but it slid past without me being able to comprehend what it was. The book itself was familiar, but even though I was seeing it as a visual recreation through a phantasm I could still feel the power behind it.

"The Corpus Mysteriorum." Jetta stated blandly, gesturing needlessly at the screen. "In parts it is a grimoire, in others a history, and yet further an instruction manual of apparent gibberish. Those of you who are part of the Mysterium will recognize it. You," she looked pointedly at Daniel. "are a Silver Ladder mage, so I won't go further."

"I'm here as a gesture of goodwill," he replied calmly. "There's been too much conflict between the orders, and the Silver Ladder is willing to extend an olive branch to see that conflict nullified." Jetta pursed her lips, but didn't respond to him. Instead, she gave us our final orders - one part search and destroy, one part search and retrieve - and walked off down the hall, presumably to her office.

I eyed Daniel throughout her presentation, shifting my perceptions to gauge his strength. Of the ten Arcana, Prime was perhaps the best-suited to judging strength, though certain combinations of other Arcana cast conjunctionally could provide judgment just as easily. So I viewed Daniel through a lens of Life and Spirit, using the latter to get a glimpse of his soul and the former to judge its relative strength by whether the spell made me view him as predator or prey, and to what degree with either.

It wasn't particularly surprising when I sensed him as being the mystical equivalent of a newborn, though when I swept my gaze across my other two friends my eyebrows wanted to rise into my hairline. Mitch was the same, and David's actual power hadn't changed at all. Tay and Serena were significantly stronger than I was, a fact I deduced from my hackles attempting to rise and the strength of my instinct to flee, though it was summarily quashed. As for Jetta, well…it was obvious that she'd attained her position via merit, rather than power.

"Well, what are we waiting for?" Serena demanded, removing her hands from her hips to point a finger at me. "You, Boy! Make a portal to…" She narrowed her eyes momentarily in an expression of thought. "…to Toronto."

Oh yes…the first chance I got I was dropping a stinging nettle bush on her.

"Are you going to be patient enough to wait for me to identify a safe location and then weave a portal there?" I asked sweetly. "Because it will take at least an hour and probably longer."

"I thought you were a Sneak," she sniffed, before turning to Tay. "Brother, I strongly recommend dumping that loser. He can't even create a portal with any alacrity."

"Getting things done as fast as possible isn't everything," I muttered. Serena raised an eyebrow in my general direction, and then said something I couldn't completely catch though I thought it was something around the lines of "Fucking shamans."

Tay seemed to be taking it in stride, and gestured us into the destination room. After we filed in he closed the door, and gestured at the centre of the room. Elevator doors opened and we stepped through into an alley in a part of Toronto I recognized from the only visit I'd ever made there. Here.

…Whatever.

"This is one of the first cities Jetta suggested as a possible destination for those Guardians," Tay said, sweeping a hand around the glamorous alley. The portal closed as Mitch's feet cleared the threshold, and I repositioned my knife into the pocket on my left hip for relatively easy access. It would be particularly difficult to explain it to city police if I just left it hanging off my belt like that. Tay rubbed his arms, as though cold, and ran a finger down his sister's sleeve. It writhed and reformed into a garment that appeared to be decidedly warmer than the original: a yoga outfit. At the same time his own clothing changed, becoming blue jeans and a plaid shirt. The objects on his utility belt slid up, onto his back and were cocooned in a dark green cloth backpack. All in all, he looked like a lumberjack.

I decided not to take offence.

"So what are we expecting to do here?" Mitch asked. "And more to the point: how are we going to find the Guardians?"

"At least one of the thieves was Canadian," Serena snapped. "Were you not listening? This is where she was assigned prior to being recalled."

"So you know who they are?" David asked, though it was more of a statement. "Then why not scry for them?"

I answered for him. "They've given themselves personal wards. Those will block any Space magic from affecting them…but they'll have to take the wards down to use a portal or teleport."

"I guess you aren't just another redneck hick Canadian after all, Boy," Serena commented, coming dangerously close to complimenting me.

"Is she always so…caustic?" I asked Tay, and he shrugged, glancing at his sister. She narrowed her eyes dangerously, and then widened them when her brother answered me.

"She likes you, is all. She's got issues with proper social expression." Serena had an expression that made me thing of a cat with its ears laid back and its tail lashing violently.

"So by being polite to you…?" I left the rest unsaid.

"Exactly." He shrugged again, and set off down the alley to the street. "We're going to meet with the Canadian Guardian's team-mates. They've been…if not exactly friendly then at least not as apathetic towards our endeavours as most Guardians. As Censors, our paths tend to align quite nicely until the end-point, at which the decision to hide or destroy an object that could potentially violate the Veil is made. They opt for destruction more often than not, unless that's impossible, and if that's the case their typical response is to hide it in a deathtrap that nobody can enter; not even their most powerful." He glanced between the three Canadians of us. "Any of you know the number of a cab company whose fleet contains vans?" We shook our heads. I could think of a couple for Ottawa, and perhaps Daniel could do the same for Calgary. David might know one for Kingston, and Mitch, well…perhaps, wherever he lived. "No? Then we'll be hoofing it. I don't like Toronto city transit, and all the phonebooks in this area are outdated."

"Then why don't we call an operator?" Serena asked in a pleasant voice. She must've been pissed about Tay's comments on her social inequities.

"Do you have any Canadian lucre?" He replied in a similar tone.

"Had you bothered to ask…," Daniel began, pulling out a cell phone. "…then transportation could have been easily arranged." He dialled up an operator and requested to be connected to a taxi company in Toronto. After a few moments he glanced down the street while asking for a van, and then gave the company the nearest intersection. He glanced at the Censors and said, "Problem solved."

Serena's mouth pursed in vexation, but Tay nodded in appreciation.

"Excellent," he said, setting off toward the pickup-point. We followed in a motley group.

-

The taxi pulled up outside a house on Rose Ave, where Serena convinced the driver that he'd been paid, and Tay led the way to the front door. As we walked up I tuned into the pulse of life, gradually filtering out the plant and insect-life as I went. With its Space component I could pinpoint each of those creatures in a 3D mental image of my immediate surroundings. Every kind of organism had a different shade of color to it in accordance with the Imago I'd formed. Plants were green; insects yellow; birds blue; and mammals were red. Other micro-organisms were different shades of grey, all of it pretty simply color-coded. I couldn't get much more specific than that until I was able to actually see it. I worked my way through avian and non-sentient mammalian organisms until only the six of us showed up in my mind's eye. I could determine that we were human, could determine individual ages and genders, and the rough state of health of each one.

I couldn't sense anything similar within the house.

There were the usual minor fungal colonies, bacteria in what I assumed was the washroom and the kitchen. Flies zipped around like green streaks, a bird nested under the eaves on the far side…but nothing human. Once I actually got up on the stoop I had a good guess as to why. A massive cloud of flies buzzed in a corner of the basement, with larvae crawling over something…human-shaped. A few slithered around inside it, but otherwise the mass of maggots acted like a very effective topical imaging device.

I grabbed Tay's arm as he reached to ring the doorbell, and when he looked at me quizzically, I shook my head. After a few moments he nodded, glanced around then nodded to Daniel. His eyes grew unfocused as he swept a gaze concentrated on something ephemeral over the front of the building, before shaking his head and communicating the lack of magical wards quite well.

My friend stepped up to the door and held his hand over the knob, not quite touching it. Inky black threads rose from his palm and sank into the keyhole, and after a few minutes I heard a _click_. The shadows grasped the doorknob and turned it, spreading over the door to add more force and to push in. We filed in, and David's shadows pushed the door shut behind us.

Inside, the house was fairly normal-looking, albeit bereft of photographs. There were plenty of pictures, but they were all scenes or still-life paintings. The living room was pristine, like something out of a catalogue, and both the kitchen and the dining room were just barely less so. I could sense bacterial colonies on the sides of the stove, and a few fungi underneath the sink, but even as I "watched" they began dying off. I didn't think anything of it until Tay started going downstairs, and Daniel said, "What's that smell?"

My nostrils flared, catching a faint, acrid scent and David worked some sort of spell of knowing. I glanced at him in time to see his eyes widening before the house collapsed.


	4. Chapter 4

How much later it was when I came to, I'm not sure

How much later it was when I came to, I'm not sure. Under my left hand I could feel fractured stone, and under my right was something that felt like drywall. As sensation gradually began to restore itself, I found myself pinned face-down in a place utterly without light. I was getting air, but it smelled like dust and something acidic. I tried to move and let out a whimper that my brain took a moment to register as mine. There was still sensation in my toes, but something was wrong with my calf. It felt wet, and there was pressure somehow inside it, from one side to the other. My arms didn't want to move, though I forced myself to flex my fingers for assurance that I could still use them.

Something clattered - a sound from very far away - and I wanted to call out to it. The sound was warped on its way out, however. I heard mewling, like a poor little kitten, new to the world and crying for its mother's warmth, and I realized that it was me.

My jaws clamped shut and I tried once again to move, this time dislodging some dust from up above. It splattered against the hood of my shirt, which had somehow managed to come up over my head on the way down.

It was a small mercy.

Pressure shifted on my back and I felt one of my ribs crack as more weight came down from one edge of a board. This time I didn't restrain my cry of pain; I couldn't. Immediately the weight vanished and I went as limp as possible, breathing shallowly to avoid straining the break.

After a moment to compose myself I sent my awareness throughout my body to assess the damage. It seemed my body was just one large bruise, though I had something thin, but about an inch wide impaling my leg…fortunately, it missed the major artery, albeit by millimetres. There were only two breaks: the femur of my other leg had a hairline fracture running up its length, and the seventh rib down on my left. There weren't many cuts, but several scratches that came close to bleeding. I focused my energies on repairing the broken bones first. They had held me in a state of numbing shock, and when they were gone all the rest of my body's injuries clamoured to let themselves be known. The impact of those sensations stunned me for nearly an hour, during which I was dimly aware of people digging. What sounded like whole pieces of lumber being tossed around reached me as though from a great distance - or through a fuck of a lot of pain. The main piece of house that pinned me to the ground was lifted completely off me and I wanted to cry for relief. What I did instead was use the only parts of me that hadn't really been damaged - my hands - to push myself up, pull my hood off, and look to see who had freed me.

Daniel stood on one side with sections of wood floating above and behind him, while David knelt on the other, inky shadows wrapped around bits of flooring and other objects. From my point of view, it appeared the entire house had been hollowed out, but the walls and roof still remained intact.

I curled in on myself and whimpered when something was forcibly pulled from my leg, sparing only a moment to override my body's autonomous functions and co-opt the healing process. Although I could've had it all gone in under a minute, it didn't make sense to waste the Mana on something that would - by my estimate - take an hour or two to make me completely bruise free. As it was the wound on my leg already began to clot, and the pain from my bruises faded. I'd be tender for some time, but it no longer hurt to move.

Something clattered to the ground beside me. When I looked it turned out to be my utility knife, though it had a few spatters of blood on it.

"Considerably lucky that you didn't bleed out from that," Serena commented as she helped me to my feet, after I grabbed my knife and located the sheath…which was still in my pocket.

Strange.

Wincing, I shifted my weight to my uninjured leg; I wouldn't be putting any tension on that particular muscle for some time yet.

"Wha-" I coughed, and accepted a proffered bottle of water. After washing some of the dust out of my throat, I tried again. "What happened? Why did the house break?"

"There goes my opinion of your vaunted intelligence," she muttered. "Yes, the house 'broke.' It fucking imploded. An engineered trap set by the original Guardians, I suppose, though it had a magical trigger. Can you make it up the rubble?" I eyed the slope and gauged my strength, considering my state.

"Probably not. Give me a second." I knelt on my uninjured leg, extending the stabbed one in front of me. Rolling up the pant-leg, I brushed my hands off as much as possible before laying my hands on either side of the injury. Even had my hands been clean I imagined it would sting, but the grit and dust fucking **burned**! Clenching my teeth, I performed a few mental exercises Ashvixen had taught me to get through or at least around the pain. Even as Serena snorted, muttering about "unnecessary dramatics" I lashed out with my magic, sending it coursing through my body, but what I wanted repaired most of all was my leg. It was the focus, and everything else was a secondary benefit. The wound sealed over completely, new flesh working to push out the foreign debris, and when I took my hands away smooth skin - albeit with body hair - was revealed to the air. In addition most of my bruises were gone, but the healing time was cut down from a couple hours to perhaps thirty minutes.

"Come on!" Serena snapped, hauling me to my feet with surprising strength. "I don't doubt there are 'authorities' on the way here and the longer we remain, the higher the chances of our being detained by those poor fools!"

"Where's Tay?" I asked between scrabbling my way up the slope of rubble. Daniel and David replaced their loads of detritus as we crawled, and joined us at the backdoor.

"He's outside, keeping an eye out."

"And Mitch?" David's face clouded as I asked this, while we filed outside. He looked away, focusing on something distant and unseen.

"Something grabbed him. It was just before the floors collapsed."

Tay wrinkled his nose when he saw me, but otherwise didn't say anything about it as he made us grab each other's hands and form into a circle. My stomach dropped out on me as I experienced a moment of weightlessness in a vast, all-encompassing nothingness that could only pass as the absence of both light and darkness. I was aware of the others, but not with any of my physical senses.

It was just a moment, however, and in the next we were on a rooftop, in the middle of a dark thunderstorm.

"London," Tay supplied, when Serena looked at him expectantly. He shrugged and walked to the side of the roof, onto the fire escape staircase and began climbing down. The rain didn't do much for traction, but the steps had been built with that in mind, though the whole thing was ill-suited for my height or David's width. It seemed to have been constructed for a family of anorexic midgets. "Liam? I'm a little tired, and the Arcanum of Space isn't exactly my strong suit. Can you scry for your friend?"

I felt like I'd swallowed my tongue. _Space isn't his strong suit? He can create a portal with a moment's notice or teleport the lot of us and he's not that good in it? He's a Master of the fucking Arcanum!_ Instead of saying what I thought, I breathed out and passed a hand in front of my eyes as though pulling a curtain back or brushing bangs away, the mnemonic device for the rote spell. Supernal geometric equations flashed through my mind's eye, focused on Mitch's face. I applied my will and found my searching will rebuffed.

"He's warded," I shook my head. "I can't reach him."

"They'll have been quick, careless," Tay countered. "If you're fast enough then you can break through the barrier."

"It would take me hours to build up that kind of inertia," I replied.

"Then why don't you ask for help?" Serena asked sweetly. "I may know nothing of the Arcanum of Space, but my brother is a Master, and your friend David here is at least an Apprentice."

Tay looked stunned for a moment, then nodded. "She's right. I may be depleted of Mana from all this gallivanting about, but I can still assist in a ritual."

"If I can help, I will," David added. I pursed my lips, giving myself a moment for consideration before nodding.

"Show me how."

-

The process was fairly simple, made more so because both David and Tay were Moros mages and already relatively attuned to one another. They stood behind me, one at either shoulder with one hand resting lightly on it as I knelt in the rain. Their will to grant their aid and my will to accept it created the bond, temporary though it was.

With the heavy rainstorm, I didn't dare bring out my tarot cards, but fortunately I had something a little more potent.

I hissed as the razor cut into my palm, a carefully superficial wound whose purpose was to bleed. Reaching for the thread of sympathy between Mitch and myself, I began to chant in a soft voice. David and Tay followed my lead after hearing the words I'd chosen. They referred to the Arcanum of Space; to seeing and hearing at a distance; and most importantly: to penetrating barriers.

I was dimly aware of Serena and Daniel circling us, a response to the latter's question about what he could do to help. Aside from guard us…not much, but he took to it with a passion, as though it were the most important thing that had to be done.

The chanting of Atlantean runes built up additional power, though if I could accurately weave the power into a functioning spell was yet to be seen.

I kept up the chanting as I worked my will, using it as a focus for my will. For brief moments reality seemed to flash into an infinitely complex pattern, and the sympathetic connection I worked on was just one thread amongst trillions. It was at that point I closed my eyes, refocusing all my concentration on the Imago.

Bent over the blood pooled in my hand, I only realized the spell was complete when the resistance of it vanished, piercing some distant barrier like a hot knife through butter. When I opened my eyes I saw the image of Mitch sitting on a bench - a pew - in a temple somewhere. His face was puffy, but his eyes drooped as though he were heavily drugged. The perspective was not as though I was there, as I would normally, but reflected in the pool of blood that I had cupped in my hands.

"He's there," I whispered, jarring Tay and David. They'd been caught up in the pattern of chanting, and my sudden departure from that pattern had been relatively sudden. Tay glanced into the pool and nodded, then gestured to Serena and Daniel. They gathered around as Tay hissed in pain. I saw his flesh become sallow, his countenance becoming that of a corpse for a brief moment.

…_Scouring…_

The word came to me, and I nodded with comprehension. He was drawing Mana out of his living tissue as preparation for a portal or teleportation spell.

"Attend me," he grunted, and I shifted until I stood behind him, a hand on both of his shoulders. I followed his lead of chanting and lent him my strength, a little saddened that David couldn't help…but he wasn't knowledgeable enough in the Arcanum to be able to create a portal.

Yet.

After a couple false starts Tay forced the portal open through the minimally weakened wards, and we all dashed through on Serena and Daniel's heels. I paused only to flush a final wave of healing energy through my body to eliminate the cut on my hand and to draw my knife, but as I stepped across the threshold I turned to see what was taking Tay so long.

He grinned maliciously as he waved "goodbye" to me and shut the portal.

_Oh shit._

I turned and watched as Serena arched an eyebrow before fading into mist, and I didn't need Daniel's gasp of "Phantasm!" to realize what she'd actually been.

Mitch looked up at us blearily as we rushed toward him, each of us keeping an eye peeled for anything…untoward.

"Hey guys," he slurred, waving a hand at us. David glanced at me for assistance and I grimaced.

"Oh, you're so not going to love me for this," I muttered, grabbing Mitch's head between my hands and essentially crammed a chunk of purifying spell down his throat. The way this particular effect functioned was for his natural waste removal network - the lymphatic system - to suddenly be super-charged and begin removing it extraordinarily quickly. The body's natural wastes, as well as other debris that had managed to enter into the body; they were removed as best as possible. With the magical energy co-opting it this process was significantly more efficient, but there were only a few ways for the body to get rid of waste…and the fastest was to dump it into the urine.

"Oh, God!" Mitch cried out, eyes widening as he broke out of my grasp and ran to relieve himself against a wall. David gave a wry attempt at a chuckle before looking around, and the sound simply died in his throat.

We stood in an enormous room, as though in some sort of cathedral that had all of its religious articles removed. The windows were boarded up, and except for half a dozen pews the rest were smashed into splinters and nails. The main entrance was, well…the doors were missing, but beyond that it opened up into darkness so absolute it couldn't have been night.

"So glad of you to join us," a woman stated grandly from the dais, and we turned as one to see Jetta Onyx standing proudly, a worn book which I had no doubts was the Corpus Mysteriorum tucked safely under her arm. She pulled it out and opened it to a book-marked page, then grinned warmly before chanting a few words of High Speech.

I began to move, but David and Daniel were faster, the former lashing out with whips of shadow and the latter grabbing for the book. By taking the time to chant, Jetta had opened herself up for an attack, but she dodged the grasping shadows even as she maintained her grip on the book. A flash of energy from my right drew my attention to a tall man who gave me a little smirk and motioned for me to come at him. I had my knife in a reverse grip and was stalking toward him before I even realized what I was doing, but I held back for the few seconds necessary to cloak myself in a pair of shields; one of Life, one of Space. The former would affect my body itself, and even though the latter was the stronger of the two, it would not protect me in the event that my opponent and I started grappling.

Faintly, I was aware of several more people appearing across the room…although some immediately began combating each other, rather than ganging up on the four of us. It appeared we had at least a few allies.

The tall man and I came at each other low and fast, our respective knives seeking to tear through flesh and rend vital tissues apart. For a while we seemed evenly matched, until I got in behind his guard and slammed him up against the wall, my free hand holding his knife-hand up above him. A heartbeat passed as we breathed heavily, then I tore myself away, dragging my knife's blade out of his lung as I pulled free. He choked and coughed up a bit of foamy blood as his breath whistled through the new gap.

As he sagged to the ground, he grinned one last time before his eyes closed and his chest ceased to rise, and he discorporated into mist. Not unlike the Serena-phantasm.

The ground began to rumble as I looked around, taking stock of the situation. David was carving his way through a horde of oncoming phantasms, his shadows whirling around like a tornado of razors with him at its epicentre. Daniel was simply telekinetically wielding a pair of pews like giant clubs, and any phantasms that got near Mitch simply discorporated, as though the spell keeping them in existence were ended.

When the phantasms "died" they simply misted away, but between one breath and the next they were all simply gone, and Jetta laughed maniacally as an enormous stone hand engraved with spirals of Atlantean runes thrust up, through the cathedral floor. Another followed a few feet away, and together they dragged the rest of the body through. It stood about half as tall as the point of the cathedral's ceiling, but its arms were long enough to mitigate that. The golem looked like nothing so much as a giant gorilla, albeit slate-grey and covered in spirals of runes that flared red and green around the edges. I sheathed my knife as a matter of it being absolutely useless against something like this…although it came out again a few moments after my hand left the grip. There were still people hanging out around the edges of room, and something told me they were the real kind.

"_Attack them!"_ The voice - Mitch's - resounded in my head alongside Daniel's, _"Remove the grimoire from Jetta!"_

In truth, there was no real contest in whose advice was most pertinent. These enemy mages could be dealt with, but not if we were crushed to death by a giant stone monkey.

Another appraising sweep of my eyes across the room told me that the others had their hands full with just staying alive. David was borne aloft by his shadows, dodging around the golem's one grasping arm like some sort of winged octopus, while the other reached for Daniel, who appeared to be using an interesting form of Forces-based telekinesis to boost his acrobatic capabilities…which seemed to be much more formidable than I recalled.

_Has he been trained by Arrows as well?_ The idle thought arose of its own volition as I rushed toward Jetta, knife held flush against the belly of my forearm. A stone fist came down immediately in front of me and cratered the floor, but I grabbed hold of an outcropping to swing myself around and plant my feet against the backside of its hand. Thus anchored - however momentarily - I pushed off and hit the ground running, though I did have to correct for overshooting my target.

I took one last leap just before the dais and attempted to take Jetta down, soaring at her in what would have otherwise been a perfect tackle, had I not simply passed through her. It wasn't that she'd side-stepped or dodged me somehow…it was that her body, although visible, was incorporeal. Growling deep in my throat, I picked myself up from my sprawl and advanced on her again, this time with significantly more care.

She sniffed haughtily at me, and though she held herself in a relaxed stance, I noticed certain wariness in her eyes.

_Why is she worried?_ I slashed through her, wrinkling my nose as the blade - and my fist - passed through her body as though it weren't there. She was opaque, and looked like she was here, but somehow she was not. _Can I hurt her?_ The stone golem began lumbering around, turning its attention away from the others and toward me. Jetta stepped out of the way as the stone construct drew pack a massive arm to strike me.

With my shielding spells still active, space was tweaked just enough to turn the dead-on blow into a glancing one, and my body absorbed some of the damage…but I still felt something crack in my shoulder when I landed against the wall.

Groaning, I struggled to stand, only to be thrown toward the far wall of the building. A pew interrupted my journey, though it was quickly removed by a combined effort by David and Daniel, using both telekinetic force and shadows-given-substance to propel it like a missile at the charging golem's head. The poor piece of furniture splintered, but the creature was driven back into the narrow nook at the far end, where the altar and choir would ordinarily have been placed. This, in turn, gave me enough time to piece together a rough version of a rote I'd read up on once upon a time. It had been before I had the grasp of the required concepts, but now that I was an Apprentice of Spirit, the working of it was available to me.

Now if only my head were clear enough for me to remember how to do it.

Hands grabbed me and pulled me to the side, out of another ground-shaking slam of the golem's fist into the floor where my legs had been. A flash of frigidity throughout my body had me stiff as a board for the few moments it took for my flesh to writhe and wriggle.

The cold snap released me before long, but I had to gather myself to even begin moving. I knew I'd had a cut on my forehead, but the pain was gone and ginger touches to my forehead revealed no such injuries. My shoulder seemed to have also been repaired, and with the cessation of pain came my senses. I gathered my will alongside the Imago, eyeing a golem that had sprouted several combatants detrimental to its progress.

"'Bout fuckin' time," a gruff voice growled somewhere behind me, but I didn't bother to check out the new company. Why would they bother Healing me if they were against me? A remembered chill ran down my spine at their method, so different from my own gentle warmth and itching.

The spell came into being with a sensation akin to donning a pair of goggles. On the right side of my field of vision, a list of Atlantean runes descended in a specific order, and various parts of the golem were highlighted by circles with tabs containing more detailed information. It told me it was a stone spirit - no shit, Sherlock - what was commonly referred to in Awakened circles as a count, but this one was bound to the book and the golem-form was simply its primary Numen combined with its Influence. Unfortunately, that was as much detail as the spell imparted before it ran out of information about the golem, but when I flicked my eyes to Jetta it remained blank.

_So she's not a spirit, but isn't quite there…and not an illusion either, or there would've been distortions._

Somebody smacked me upside the head, and when I turned a found myself face to face with a wry-looking older man, perhaps in his mid-fifties.

"Pay attention, Boy," he barked. _Fuck, I hate that word._ "She's slipped just slightly out of phase with this world into Twilight. Not enough to be there completely, but its enough to be untouchable by the physical. You know what to do from that?"

"Informative," I murmured, cracking my knuckles. While I wasn't nearly as efficient with my hands and feet as with my blade, I could still do the job. Whispering to my flesh in the tongue of spirits, I told it to reach across, to stretch into Twilight and hold sway there as well as here. Technically, it would only prove effective against spirits, and anything else was still beyond my reach…but it would be enough, if Jetta had used the Spirit Arcanum to attain the effect. Unfortunately, it wouldn't extend toward my weapon, allowing only my flesh to contact spirits.

Magical interference began to spark within me, and I hastily let go of the spell for spiritual analysis. My body could only handle two or three separate spells at the same time before their individual resonances began fucking with my will-working.

The golem was now thoroughly distracted by, well…everybody, it seemed. Half a dozen Arrow mages crawled over its body and struck it with guns or swords; the latter was archaic weaponry to be sure, but even I had seen proven its efficacy. David and Daniel were now trying to restrain the construct, and Mitch was doing his damnedest at…something. It involved the Time Arcanum, but beyond that I couldn't determine exactly what it was he was trying to accomplish.

That I could readily see, the only people who weren't engaged in combat were me, the older Arrow who'd Healed me, and Jetta.

With all the obviously magically-enhanced, death-defying acrobatics going on, it occurred to me to wonder why an excruciating Paradox wasn't being invoked. As I glanced at the older man to ask, he seemed to read my mind and answered for me.

"We're in a Demesne, Boy. One of a rare few made from collaborators from all five Paths. That's why you can't sense it: there's nothing out of proportion in this place."

"Thanks," I nodded, before dashing toward Jetta, blood rising in a predatory surge.

-

The end result was…bloody. Jetta hadn't really been paying attention to me, more trying to get her golem to crush the attacking Arrows and too busy to cast defensive spells against me. It was fortunate that she hadn't realized I'd caught on to her little trick, though maybe not for my knuckles. Even through my organic shield I'd managed to bruise them a bit, but it was certainly worth it.

Although I did retch later upon learning that I'd killed her by fracturing her skull with a steel-toe-booted kick that had driven fragments of bone into her brain. It was fortunate that upon her death the golem had simply locked up…although in such an awkward position that it toppled over and nearly squished Mitch and two Arrow mages, though of the three one had her leg broken and had to be dug out to get free.

As the Arrows cleaned up the scene and David leafed through the Corpus Mysteriorum with a look of mixed awe and fascination on his face, I let myself feel what I'd done to Jetta. I forced myself to look at her body, crumpled where it lay after receiving such a savage beating. It brought up sensations I found disturbing.

Or rather, the lack of sensations was what troubled me. I felt bad that I'd killed her, certainly, but it was a sadness brought on by intellectual comprehension that she'd given in to the temptation of power and had been corrupted…and gave rise to the same feeling I'd have if I were to have euthanized a rabid dog. The lack of feeling came from when I went back over what I'd done, analyzing the act of killing. I was scared of the apathy, for it was the apathy of doing a job that needed doing.

It was fear I felt, for finding myself capable of killing.

I wept for my lost innocence.


	5. Chapter 5

Groaning into the pillow, I wanted to unleash spells terrible in their might upon that foul device that had awoken me from my less-than-fitful slumber. For half a second its horrific noise drowned out all thought, followed by half a second of silence ominous for the absolute certainty of its resurgence.

After a full minute the sound became unbearable and I thought again about brandishing magic in order to fulfill my monetary needs, but as always the guilt over such a notion quashed the thought. Dragging myself from beneath the warm and welcoming covers of my bed, I walked across the dark room and fumbled atop the repulsive black horror of glaring red numerals to activate the snooze button, and ended up shutting the thing off instead.

I could have cried. Instead of another nine minutes of dread-filled rest, I had ensured that I had to remain out of bed or fall to the allure of slumber and be late for work. Unfortunately, there was no contest in what took priority.

Muttering under my breath, I grabbed my voluminous towel - which yet remained in dire need of a trip through the washing machine - and paced to the bathroom to shower and wash away the evidence of the afternoon's pre-slumber activities, as well as the sweat-and-detritus build-up that always seemed to occur over a period of sleep.

The temptation to make the water as hot as I could stand was powerful, but I conquered it with will born of cut-and-pasting true realities upon this false one. I kept the water lukewarm, and soon had to step out or give in and turn the temperature up.

On my return to my room I relished in its inability to disperse heat properly, a state of mind sure to be reversed come summer in this ridiculous Canadian city.

_Maybe on my next couple days off I'll go to Europe,_ I thought idly, dressing in my dark blue work-shirt, the Mac's logo embroidered above a pocket on the left breast. _Maybe I'll visit Amsterdam._ Inside it was my nametag and a pen for ease of location, if necessary - and it often was.

In the next few minutes I donned the rest of my winter clothing and stowed in one of the inner pockets of my jacket a little grimoire devoted to half a dozen spells belonging to the Life Arcanum, each of which required the reader to be at minimum of Disciple-rank in order to fully comprehend. Though my intention was not to memorize the rotes, I was only new-come to this degree of understanding - within Life, at least - and so needed guidelines to understand my limits, and how I could push at them. I knew I had gained access to the Practices of Fraying, Weaving and Perfecting, but to fully comprehend them…that would take study.

I locked the apartment behind me and went outside, trudging through the snow on my way to work. It was soothing in its own way, having a job. It gave me a constant, a regular schedule I could adhere to for sanity, and as such it was certainly welcome.

Living as a Sleeper was unexpectedly therapeutic, for all the stress I gained by dealing with ignorance both of the Lie and everyday infractions of common sense. Serving customers who knew nothing of the Truth, had no ulterior motives beyond perhaps trying to steal a chocolate bar here or there…nobody was engaged in their own petty little power struggles for dominion of a community or this or that Hallow, and I ensured the supernaturals who entered the store understood there were to be no open hostilities inside my domain to maintain that sense of peace. Surprisingly, most of the grumbling came from the mages…though the vampires were a close second. The werewolves didn't care one way or the other, but understood that the store was part of my "territory" and accepted my rules as a matter of courtesy. The mages thought that since I was one of them, I should look the other way when they wanted to grab somebody from inside the store who they had grievances with. Vampires considered me prey until I ripped the fangs out of the nasty little shit that tried to bite me four days after I got back from the cathedral…event. After that they treated me with a little more care.

I stepped into the store and grabbed the keys my co-worker tossed at me, locking the door. Before discarding my jacket behind the counter I grabbed the "Shift change: 10 minutes" sign and post it on the glass above the little sticker listing the compliment/complaint phone number. We did our counts of the lottery tickets and recorded the weights of the two pocket-slots containers, counting separately to ensure accuracy.

Hasanen, my Iranian co-worker, talked to me about some of his classes and asked me about some words he was having trouble with. After dealing with him for so many months I had little trouble understanding his meaning through his accent, but I was also aware that many people would not have the same ease of comprehension, so I did my best to fill in the gaps where his English-language instructors had erred.

After the computer finished cycling through the ten-minute "End of Day" function, Hasanen unlocked the door and handed me both keys and sign, grabbed his voluminous winter coat and remnant dishes from his dinner then rushed out into the chilly winter evening with a grimace. I guess he still wasn't completely comfortable with our weather.

As soon as the door was opened five people immediately filed in. Three lined up at the ATM and I took a breath, whispering under my breath to the God and Goddess for patience. I knew that at least one of them would bring a twenty-dollar bill up to the cash and either ask for change or buy something with an absurdly low price. The other two customers wandered about, a couple that wanted something but hadn't a clue what it was.

I kept watch on them all, my eyes roving about as I ensured they didn't have any time in which to steal anything. The three at the ATM got their money and two left with a nod in my direction, while the third attempted to get change for his bill.

Cocksucker.

I informed him that I could not open the till to change his bill without a purchase, and as predicted he got huffy about it, puffing himself up like an irate chicken.

"Well, the day-guy let me do it!" He declared, and I had to resist grinding my teeth. "So why can't you do it?"

"Because it's a security feature at night," I replied in a slightly condescending manner. There was no way in hell I could manage a completely neutral tone of voice. "The fewer times the till is opened at night, the safer it is for me."

"What, somebody's going to bust in here and demand all the cash just because you're giving me two fives and a ten?"

"It's a possibility."

He sneered and snatched a pack of gum from one of the counter displays and all but hurled it at me. Swiping it across the barcode-reader, I totaled it and gave him the final price.

"Two-oh-two." He thrust the twenty at me and waited as I counted out the change. As it was the beginning of my shift and I wasn't feeling benevolent enough to dig into the float for bills, he ended up receiving his seventeen dollars and ninety-eight cents in a mix of toonies, loonies, quarters, nickels and dimes. And three pennies.

The sad excuse for a sack of shit was pissed off, understandably, and gestured violently at me with the hand in which he held his change.

"What the fuck is this?"

"It looks to be seventeen dollars and ninety-eight cents," I replied blandly, closing the till with a decisive _bang_. "Will there be anything else?"

"Fucking retard," he snapped, placing his change into his pocket, grabbed his gum and walked to the door, almost hitting another customer who was about to come in as he pushed it open violently. "Goddamn asshole!" He called back over his shoulder as he stepped outside.

"I try!" I replied loudly, then turned to the next in line with a bright smile on my face. "Hi! And what do you want?"

My night looked up significantly after that. The couple - who'd been next - congratulated me on my patience and the boyfriend remarked that had he been in my place he would've given the bastard a black eye. A carefully subtle eyeing of his stance and build allowed me to determine that it was most likely bravado to try and impress his girlfriend, so I didn't say anything. It'd been a nice gesture on his part, so I wouldn't poke at his pride.

Around midnight I did the first of several mops, removing the unsightly muddy water from the floor and leaving it its normal stained off-white-but-not-quite-yellow color. Once again I reflected on how we needed to rip the tiles out and replace them with something new and actually polished. After that was done and the initial boom of customers had finished, I settled down for some studying.

For practicing some of the spells I pulled a couple mice me from a pet store in a mall on Heron Rd, opposite the highway from me. Having been there a couple times before it was a simple matter to scry into the store and teleport the rodents to me from their cage. Spur-of-the-moment as the decision to use them was, I was somewhat unprepared for their arrival and got a couple nasty nips for my trouble before I could grab one of the Froster cups and stow them inside. They displayed impressive jumping ability before I put them to sleep. With the magic backing the effect up they'd remain unconscious unless excessively jostled or injured, so being poked and prodded by my spells would do little to change that.

Throughout the rest of the shift I familiarized myself with the finer points of organic transmutation when I wasn't topping off the milk, pop or juice coolers, or ensuring that the coffee and cappuccino machines were cleaned and filled. I transformed the mice into very nearly everything that would remain within the cup, reinforcing the sleep-spell every hour in order to keep them sedated. When I tired of the total transformations I began experimenting with the partial switches. Changing an organism into another was one thing, but altering a portion or aspect of its body and forcing the creature's body to accept those changes as a natural part of its form was something else entirely.

In other words…I went through half a dozen mice before managing to get everything about the transformation correct. I'd been able to do the same with insects and plants, but those were simpler organisms and insects were more abundant for experimentation.

Though the spells were vulgar, they were small magics, and the risk of Paradox was minimized through my use of the grimoire. The counter to that was the customer load. Even though there weren't many people at night normally, I still had to be careful that nobody saw me changing mice into a myriad of tiny creatures, or Paradox would've become a true problem.

It was a slow night - unsurprising, being Sunday - what with everybody nursing hangovers from Saturday night and readying for work on Monday. Overall I barely broke three-hundred in total sales, and the only reason I managed that was because a woman came in at six and bought two adult bus passes.

I sent the still-living mice back and dropped the corpses into the garbage can before taking it out to the dumpster, then finished up the end-of-shift duties before my boss came in to take over. When everything was done I sat and waited, with the exception of when a customer came in, in which case I stood up and waited for them to finish their selections.

My boss - an East Indian guy named Mohammed, but who preferred we call him "Q" - came in and we chatted for a while about my shift and I clarified a few things I wasn't too sure about. I pulled my things together, and started to go outside when I felt…something.

I slipped into Life-based Magesight between one breath and the next, casting my gaze about in order to find any resonance out of the ordinary, but the still-dark Monday morning was filled with all the ordinary forms that existed throughout a day. A prickling along the back of my neck made me turn to stare back into the store, but there was nothing amiss within, either. Everything that should have been there, was, and nothing existed that shouldn't have. It was disconcerting, but perhaps it was nothing.

Then again, a mage's most powerful weapon could be his intuition. So I concentrated slightly, calling upon my skill as a Sneak and checking the Tapestry around me for spatial alterations. Again, there was nothing except the residue from my experiments.

_Weird,_ I thought to myself, setting myself back on course home.

-

I awoke with a start, the afternoon light dimming as it transitioned into evening. For a minute I blinked into the failing light, attempting to determine what had woken me up at - I checked - five-fifteen. Feeling an unfamiliar weight on the covers above my hand, I twisted to see it better, finding a heavy manila envelope addressed to me - using my shadowname of Nightfire - atop the quilt. As I raised my head to peer at the door, I saw that the two binders I had keeping the door shut against its lack of a functional handle were still in place, and when I checked over my ward I found it completely intact.

Sighing, I dragged myself out of bed just to flick on the lights, and dove back under the covers for fear of certain organs shriveling up and dying from the chill in my room.

Like some sort of soft-shelled turtle I huddled under the blankets and tore open the envelope. Inside I found a short letter from the Ottawa Consilium in strong, forceful handwriting and signed by Provost Ulfman, adjunct to Councilor Morias Ka. It ordered me to an appointment with the Councilor, though it was phrased as a request. Ulfman wasn't known for being particularly light-handed, so if I didn't show or was late he'd probably send a sheriff out to hunt me down and drag me to said meeting by my ears.

With a groan I pulled myself out of bed and quickly dressed, shutting my window completely. As I told my sister to have a good night I felt that odd sensation again, as of a spell being cast nearby, but another quick search told me there was nothing amiss.

"What _is_ that?" I muttered irritably, lacing up my boots with quick, angry motions. Whatever it was, it was annoying and slightly foreboding.

I walked down to McArthur and hopped onto the 14, getting off twenty minutes later just as the bus turned onto Elgin St. With a quick glance for traffic I dashed north across the street and speed-walked to the main path that would lead me up Parliament Hill and into the Parliament Building.

We Canadians are just so amazingly creative when it comes to nomenclature.

There were security personnel to deal with, of course, but I had limited clearance that granted me access to a few specific sections, as did pretty much any mage on good terms with the local Consilium. The guards let me through when I flashed my ID, and I continued on my way, drawing odd stares from the various politicians that crossed my path, but security knew me from previous visits and when they nodded to me, the politicians decided that despite my casual clothes I must belong.

I opened the door into Councilor Ka's office without knocking, and plumped myself down onto one of the chairs in his little waiting room. Provost Ulfman glanced at me over his laptop as I entered, nodding to himself as he identified who I was. A middle-aged man of about thirty-five or so, Ulfman's Japanese features refused to betray his true age and anyone else would have placed him in his early twenties. Following the Path of Ecstasy - as we both did - tended to preserve a mage's youth, and Ulfman had been a mage for twenty years. He was more cultured than the average Thyrsus, though…the suit he wore even now was immaculate, contrasting sharply with my cat hair-ridden cargo pants and beat-up jacket.

"I see you're prompt today," Ulfman commented offhandedly, standing up to root through his file cabinet. It had been stained a deep mahogany and finished to shining perfection, but it only had two drawers. I watched with interest as he pulled out a slate-gray folder and leafed through it, apparently counting the number of pages within. Once he flipped the folder shut he pulled from his printer a number of pages of blank paper and laid a pair of ink cartridges across the bundle. Splaying his fingers above the mass he glanced once at the door before frowning at the bundle, holding the folder in his other hand. I felt him working some sort of spell, but before I could don Magesight to watch he replaced the ink cartridges in his desk and was placing the folder back in his filing cabinet. He placed the paper from his printer into another folder - this one light brown - and held it out to me.

Taking it from him I opened it up, expecting to find little more than nothing, and instead found pages filled with a large amount of text and printed photographs. I looked up at Ulfman with an upraised eyebrow, and he shrugged.

"It was faster than printing it out anew, and we retain the original copy without recourse to potential thievery online."

"So you just use your laptop for solitaire?" I asked.

"Or porn. You can't imagine the bandwidth we have here on the Hill."

Alright, so he only appears civilized. Like any other mage on our Path he enjoys his lusts.

"Understandable. So what's this all about?" I skimmed through the pages, apparently a report on the activities of…somebody. It was a little vague with regards to names, but there was some satellite imagery that I couldn't make heads or tails of.

"You recall that debacle with Ms. Onyx?" I closed my eyes to battle my stomach's lurching, but nodded. "Councilor Ka requires your side of that story, and needs to know why there's satellite imagery of you appearing out of thin air in Florida, then disappearing into a portal." Forget lurching, my stomach simply dropped out on me completely while the blood drained from my face.

"Ha-" I stopped and cleared my tightened throat. "Have there been any awkward questions?"

"No," Ulfman steepled his fingers and inclined his head as though he were looking at me above the rims of some nonexistent spectacles. "Several operatives identified and eliminated the data before the FBI could be alerted to anything unusual. Thus far it seems there is no mention of this in global news or in any of the 'secret' organizations, but the Guardians are monitoring the situation very carefully. You understand the severity?"

Swallowing past a lump, I nodded mutely. If the Guardians were watching, they may have witnessed my experiments of the past night, and they took an especially dim view of those who "flaunted" their magic out in the open, as it could be said I'd done.

An uncomfortable silence settled on the room as Ulfman returned to his work and left me to read through the file. Now that I knew what to look for, I grimaced as I saw the series of photographs taken of the lot of us suddenly appearing then disappearing. It could only be through a veritable avalanche of good fortune that there had been somebody in place at the right time to catch it. I breathed a sigh of relief, but determined to avoid taking similar risks again if at all possible.

The door to Councilor Ka's office opened and the androgynous mage stepped out, directing David to have a seat in the waiting area. My friend took my presence in stride, nodding amiably as Ka gestured for me to follow…him, I think. The Councilor's gender had always been a little ambiguous, and was cause for much idle gossip. I wanted desperately to use a minor spell from the Life Arcanum to figure it out once and for all, but that would have been unforgivably rude.

"Nightfire," Ka looked at me with an unreadable expression. "I will speak with you now. Come." Though his voice was quiet and his face young, Ka held his power firmly and wielded it as though born to the office. As well he did, as the position of Councilor was a step below Hierarch, as a premier was to a Prime Minister. Despite his youthful features, I knew for a fact that Ka followed the Path of Thistles as an Acanthus, and he'd held the office for over forty years. Supposedly he was a member of the Mysterium, but most of the order I'd come in contact with had never been able to relate any information that would indicate the validity of that rumor. Most mages tended to think of him as an apostate: one who was part of no order.

As I walked past Ka and into his office he closed the door and lowered himself into his seat. He gestured at the hardwood chair opposite his own, and I took it carefully, noting dispassionately that it had been designed for its lack of comfort.

Ka glanced at the folder I held in a consciously loose grip and said, "You've been over the file on your discrepancies?" At my mute nod he inclined his head momentarily. "Then I won't go into it. Suffice it to say that you're being given a warning, a light admonishment in light of the fact that this is the first offence to the Lex Magica that you've made in the years that you've been living here. Oddly, it's quite refreshing that you put so much effort into maintaining the Veil. I believe the only ones who've made similar efforts are the Guardians."

"They're insane," I said carefully. "Please do not compare me to them."

"As you wish," Ka inclined his head again, not bothering to hide a sardonic quirking of his lips. "That folder is tertiary to why you're here. The primary reason is that we require a hunter. I understand your father is accomplished thusly, so I would imagine that you're possessed of at least a few of the necessary instincts."

"You need a Sentinel."

"Not quite. The position of Sentinel is more…localized. They guard. A hunter goes out, finds something, and brings it back." Ka looked at me pointedly. "Or destroys it. I require a hunter. You have a choice now, knowing what may be required. If you accept, I shall give you the details and equipment necessary to start your search. If you decline, you will leave this office and not speak of this meeting to anyone. What is your decision?"

"I accept so long as one condition is met," I stated after a long minute of thought. I knew myself to be capable of the necessary, but I shuddered to think of what I could convince myself as "necessary." "Ensure that my sister is provided for." When Ka raised one of his brunet eyebrows I clarified. "If this drags out for whatever reason or ends badly for me, make certain that she receives rent that I would otherwise pay to her. I don't particularly care how you get it to her, be it via mail or apportation or whatever."

"You care deeply for her, then?" Ka asked, regarding me carefully.

"I will kill for her," I replied in a low, deadly voice. Something about the way I said it or my expression made Ka's face pale. To my words he could only nod in understanding of the deeper meaning.

"Then we are agreed. Garrote has already agreed to my terms and has been briefed on the matter. Here's your prey."

-

A little after midnight the light pollution from Ottawa's lights faded into absolute darkness as I drove a magically enhanced Ford Focus west on the '401, on my way to Winnipeg. David dozed beside me, unused to being awake at night. My five months of working graveyard had allowed me to acclimatize to the night, and with the exception of a hypnotizing blur of scenery on either side of the vehicle and the flickering lane division lines I found little difficulty in remaining awake.

The lump in the knee-pocket of my left pant leg was my wallet, a reminder of the strings Ka had pulled. Inside was my driver's license, upgraded to G class and therefore granting me all rights and privileges accorded full drivers in Ontario and elsewhere in Canada. Just behind that were two licenses: one to bear firearms and the other to maintain concealed on my person an edged weapon whose blade could exceed six inches. David had similar cards.

The one that seemed the heaviest of them all lay in the inner pocket of my jacket, and despite it sitting in the back seat behind me I could still feel its weight.

A license to kill.

Every time I thought about it I wanted to retch. It was a horrific burden, for all that it was only to ease passage with Canadian law. Ka had seemed to only be exercising his power in granting it, as I could just as easily have created a portal above the Marianas Trench and dropped the body into it…but something told me he'd given it to me for reasons other than just eliminating potentially complex situations. The thought of it hurt, it twisted up my insides too much for it to simply be coincidence.

I wrenched up thoughts back to the road in time to pull a truly bone-headed maneuver and jerk the wheel to the left in order to keep the vehicle off the rumble-track. I felt control begin to slip as the back tires slid half a foot to the side, and in desperation I sent my power throughout the vehicle, whispering to its slumbering spirit to help me correct the slide and get it back to doing what it was supposed to do. It responded sluggishly, but the tires caught hold of the road once again and the beginnings of a fishtail smoothed out.

Breathing a sigh of relief, I glanced over at David to see if he'd woken up, but he merely snorted in his sleep and shifted into a slightly more comfortable position. When my eyes were back on the road I mentally reviewed Ka's orders.

We were following Tay Renee, the miserable bastard who'd betrayed us. Supposedly he'd begun following a Left-handed path - very insulting term, as I'm a leftie - but I had my doubts on the veracity of that. It took someone of seriously questionable morals to walk that side of the line, but perhaps I'm optimistic.

Unfortunately we couldn't track Tay if we went through a portal, not that we could really track him as is. He'd warded himself fairly completely, and probably had other little nasty surprises awaiting an unsuspecting mage.

I reacted to a passing car by slowing a couple clicks to let it get by faster, then flipped a bird to the driver for cutting back into the lane too close for comfort. His rear fender missed my front by inches, and I had to slow right down to put a reasonable amount of distance between the two vehicles.

A pair of halogen headlights from behind us lit up the inside of the Focus and flashed off the rearview, into my night-sensitized eyes. Blinking away dazzle-sparks I shook David awake violently, and ran through a list of my options. The vehicle behind us had just suddenly appeared, which didn't bode well. One moment my rear lights had simply washed the road in red…and in the next the truck popped out of nowhere.

"What's going on?" David asked sleepily, blinking in the damnably bright light.

"We're sandwiched between two nasties," I stated, pulling over into the fast lane as the car ahead flashed its brake lights. It filled the space we'd just been in while I sped off and away. Its windows were tinted, so I couldn't quite tell who was inside…but I could hazard a guess that they weren't friendly. David released his death grasp from the "oh shit!" handle and the dashboard when the car settled again, and as he took in the situation for himself I lashed out with my magic, delving into the opponent car and "suggesting" to its dormant spirit that it would fight its driver. But even as I felt the spell take hold an opposing force rent it apart.

"That didn't seem to go very well," David commented, nearly doing an Exorcist with his head as he peered at the truck. "My turn." He interlocked his fingers before violently pulling them apart. I recognized the gesture as describing forces of rending, but he added a few more movements I wasn't familiar with and let loose his will made reality. I heard the bone-chilling screech of metal tearing apart and dared a look to see David's handiwork. The car had several large rents in its side and it wobbled as it came on.

It didn't last long, unfortunately. Even as I turned my eyes back to the road the metal creaked back into place, and with the exception of some interesting patches where the paint had been left behind, it was utterly whole.

"You were saying?" I asked with acid sweetness.

"Fuck you," David said, still peering over his shoulder. It was only by the slurred sound of his voice that I knew he was biting his lip, and therefore thinking furiously. "Any bright ideas?"

"They've got at least moderate skill in Matter and Spirit," I began, but cut off and flinched to the side when a loud bang behind us spider-webbed the back window and drove a bullet into the steering wheel. For a brief moment I froze, before glaring back at the truck. It was still in the right-hand lane, in a relatively perfect position for shooting the driver of a car ahead and to the side of itself. "Fuck this…David, find me an animal. Something big that's native to Canada."

"What?" He looked at me as though I were mad. "What for?"

"I'm going to drop it in front of that truck." David's eyes lit in understanding.

"I've got a better idea." Turning back to the truck he began chanting, pulling out his bone wand as he spoke. The syllables hummed in the air, almost seeming to drown out the sound of the car's engine or the wind whistling through the hole in the back window. He performed the hand-gestures for the apportation spell and punctuated it with a stabbing motion from his wand while I slapped a hand on the dashboard in front of me with intent completely unlike anything I'd ever tried…namely, casting a Practice of Shielding spell on an inanimate object.

Before I could complete the effort, however, a brand new Hyundai Tiburon fell onto the front of the truck, and the halogen-enhanced lights darkened suddenly…so except for our headlights and those of our remaining opponent(s), I couldn't see worth shit.

As the shrieks of the wreck behind us faded, I had to spare a quip for David's choice of vehicle…my favorite kind of car.

"Didn't the lot have a minivan?"

"I couldn't find the right color," he replied, absently rolling his wand between his fingers. "I don't think I can do that again, though. There were some…issues."

"Paradox?"

"Mitigated, but I used a lot of power, and more of it was forcibly drained."

I braked hard and the car overshot us by quite a bit before it, too slowed. Whispering to the spirit of the Focus again I requested aid in stopping. Beyond an exciting little three-sixty, there was very little in the way of problems, but I held out my hand to David anyway. If he'd caused a Paradox, this surely would as well…but I needed his help to pull this off. "Assist me. Apportation."

An interesting thing to note about the spell…one requires a certain level of knowledge of another Arcanum in order to utilize it. An example lay purely in mine and David's skills. Through his abilities within the Matter Arcanum he could draw virtually any inanimate substance through, while I was limited to organisms. But that was enough for this situation.

David and I joined our power, chanting together as we performed one-handed the mudras for the rote. As I was leading, I combined a spell of scrying with the spell of apportation, locating and identifying a full-grown bull elephant somewhere in Africa. With our combined strength I wrenched it through space and gently landed it just outside the halted car. Paradox hadn't struck, but reality was beginning to get strained. Fortunately, my next few moves were covert.

The elephant was freaked, to say the least…but once I got a hand on him to reinforce his structure as best I could manage, well at that point he just tried to trample me. David distracted him as I crawled back over the car and fucked around with his instincts. In one moment he saw us as interlopers and annoying pests, and in the next he saw the approaching car as a threat to everything he considered his.

In under a minute the elephant had trashed our opponent's car, and another quick and subtle spell brought it over to us, brimming with curiosity. Before it could react, I reached out and performed a decidedly unsubtle act in forcing it into the shape of a mouse. The sudden change in perspective disoriented it for the moment it took for me to grab the rodent and transport it back to Africa. Because it was so small, the task was much easier to accomplish…but that didn't stop Paradox from trying to work its way into the equation. Rather than let it run rampant, I did my best to mitigate it, burning Mana to pull the Abyss' attention into my own body where it could be contained.

Relatively speaking.

"Dude, your eyes are glowing," David commented. "Paradox?"

"Oh yeah." I severed my connection to the spell keeping the elephant in its form, and felt it resume its natural shape in the instant before all contact was eliminated. "Let's keep going. The police are going to have a field day with this one." We high-tailed it back into the car and as I turned the ignition I glanced into the rearview to get a gander at what David had been talking about. My eyes were indeed glowing, but it was a mass of sparkles that swirled around my irises like demented fireflies, winking in and out of being. It was a cool effect, but not something I wanted a Sleeper to witness.

Once we were safely belted in, I maneuvered around the destroyed car and brought us carefully up to speed, mindful of the treacherous conditions.


	6. Chapter 6

I woke up as David pulled the Focus into a Denny's parking lot. A glance at the car's clock informed me that it was just after midnight, but that didn't have much accuracy if David had managed to get us into the next time zone.

"We crossed the border a couple hours ago," my friend stated quietly, noting my movements as indicative of my conscious state. "I've already filled the gas, but I'm running a little empty."

"When did we last stop?" I yawned, stretching as best I could within the confines of the passenger's seat.

"Six hours ago, when we switched. How're you feeling?"

"I've slept in better positions. You?"

"Same. Let's go grab something to eat."

David parked the car and locked it after we got out, shrugging into our jackets to ward off the early-morning chill. I'd missed the name of the town, and since David didn't mention it, I didn't ask about it; I cared only that we were in Manitoba. It'd been a couple days since the incident with the truck and car trying to run us off the road and since there'd been no issues with aggressive drivers beyond the occasional angry honking at our daring to drive at or perhaps a few kilometers below the speed limit.

Inside we each grabbed a newspaper from the stand beside the door and waited patiently for a waiter to seat us. Despite the low density of customers, it took a couple minutes for one to appear, though his earnest behavior made up for it.

"Welcome to Denny's!" he smiled brightly, an abhorrent expression for most people just waking up. "Will that be for just the two of you?"

"Yes, thank you," I answered, and Chuck - learned from a glance at his nametag - lead us to a booth by a window. As luck would have it, we were in the perfect position to watch our car through a light snowfall that began not long after we sat down. I ordered some French toast with two sides of sausage and a glass of cranberry juice, and David asked for milk and the breakfast platter: scrambled eggs, sausage and toast.

"Coming right up!" Chuck vanished before we could thank him, and David and I turned to our papers, perusing the news for any hints of strange or unusual activity. It was a long-shot, but sometimes we could get lucky.

A flicker of light drew our attention to the window briefly, as the snow twisted and turned in powerful currents of wind.

"Looks like we got inside just in time," David remarked with a chuckle. I snorted my amusement and went back to my paper, and a little bit of information just sort of jumped off the page at me.

"_Today's weather: Clear skies, 0 chance of snowfall."_

"David, look at this," I showed him the little notice, and we turned as one to stare outside.

My friend chewed his lower lip for a minute before saying, "Come to think of it, the sky was absolutely clear when we pulled in."

"Boy, what a storm!" Chuck exclaimed, having arrived with our meal. "I guess that's Canadian weather for ya, eh?"

"I suppose," I answered, sipping at my juice. Something was…off…

"Will there be anything else?"

"No, thank you," David replied, and Chuck took himself off to serve another batch of customers. A strong burst of wind rattled the windows, and I watched as the big Denny's sign waved with the force of the burst before the sheer amount of snow falling obscured it completely. David cleared his throat to break my fascination with the sudden storm. "I don't suppose you'd care to have a look at it," he commented conversationally. "I can't see anything in the mechanisms of it, but there is, ah…" he glanced around. "…something."

Taking his hint, I made a tiny rift into the Shadow through which I could see. It was abnormally difficult to pierce the Gauntlet, more so than should ordinarily have been possible. It was not a good sign…

Within the store was the spirit of the Denny's restaurant chain, an interesting side-effect to any chain of stores…such as 7-11, or Harvey's or Winners. An example would be that each McDonald's restaurant had a spiritual entity that looked a lot like the clown mascot, but they were all just an extension of the main spirit. In other words, one spirit existed at all store locations at once.

I looked beyond the Denny's spirit, outside into the world. It was not unlike our realm, but somehow…darker, more intimidating or predatory. And well it should seem like that, for it truly was. Spirits preyed upon spirits, and everything in the Shadow had a spirit in some form or another. That truth made it curious when I couldn't identify any spiritual motes conforming to the blizzard outside, and there should have been a truly powerful spirit up in the clouds whose presence couldn't possibly be hidden by the snow. It was absolutely normal in the spirit's realm.

According to the Shadow, this blizzard didn't exist.

I stared at the Denny's spirit until it noticed my attention and came over to our table, growing large out of proportion with the actual volume of the restaurant. It appeared as a young human of indeterminate gender, wearing an apron with an order-book in the pocket, and carrying a tray.

"Can I take your order?" it asked, flipping its order-book open and sprouting another arm with a pen in hand, awaiting my request.

"A question, please," I answered after a quick spell to speak the tongue of spirits. It wouldn't understand ordinary speech, no matter the words it seemed to speak. The spirit wrote something down in its book, flipped it shut and replaced it in the apron's pocket. For a brief moment it blurred around the edges, then morphed into someone who maintained the same androgynous features, but was somewhat older and seemed to hold a managerial position.

"How can I help?"

"The weather outside…is it caused by one who belongs to the northern skies?" Phrasing the question in such a way was not asking for a very specific response, and the Denny's spirit would take any opportunity to minimize the kind of an answer it gave; all restaurant spirits were like that. But asking something that only had two possible answers limited the extent of my debt, and a yes/no question incurred the lowest price…or an extended period of time with which to pay a higher price.

For a brief moment the Denny's spirit glanced up through the roof then returned its gaze to me. "Yes."

"On the subject of payment, I state final a year and a day extension." By giving that as my ultimatum, the spirit would reply with a service or task that would have to be completed by the end of the time-period, or I would find myself…unwelcome in future Denny's.

"Enhance sales."

"Thank you," I nodded respectfully.

"You're welcome, and have a nice day." The Denny's spirit went back to waiter-mode, and I banished the spells to return my perceptions entirely to the physical realm.

"Any luck?" David asked hopefully. In my "absence" the weather had gotten progressively worse, the skies darkening thoroughly and vision obscured beyond a couple feet.

"A bit," I answered. "Got off easy with the debt. There's a spirit causing this, but I can't sense it."

"That might not be an issue any longer," David replied, pointing. The flurry of snow was withdrawing quickly, reminding me like nothing so much of surf curling in on itself with the amassing of a large wave sucking it up to feed its own strength.

"Think we should duck?" I asked rhetorically, magically reinforcing my body.

"Sounds like a plan," David replied, doing the same with his magic…probably to drain the vitality of anything that might damage him specifically. It'd do sweet fuck all for me. We covered our heads with our jackets and ducked into the seats just in time for a microburst to shred through the building.

The windows exploded inward, a sideways rain of ripping and tearing death, followed immediately by a veritable avalanche of snow. The building shuddered as our car smashed through the wall on the other side of David from me, and other debris from the town crashed and smashed past. Everyone's screams were drowned out by the horrible shriek of the microburst. For a minute during, I thought I'd gone deaf…but the sound was so absolute it drove out meaning and sense even from its own cry.

I'm not sure how long natural microbursts last, if even more than a few seconds or perhaps as long as a minute…but this went on, and on and on. When it finally stopped, when there was nothing but silence in the snowy cocoon I'd been covered in, I let out a sob of relief as I allowed myself to go completely limp, held comfortably by the snow. Soon, though, I had to begin clawing my way up, out of the snow and toward air.

The strength of the burst had been such that the roof was torn off completely, and what snow there had been was mostly piled up against what little remained of the other end of the Denny's. Everywhere I looked it was a mass of total destruction. It was as though some giant had hurled an enormous snowball in our direction…the town had been clear-wiped off the map.

David's head popped up, out of the snow and he whistled as he surveyed the damage.

"Ho-lee-shite," he murmured, looking up. I followed his gaze and narrowed my eyes at the absolutely clear sky. It was so quiet I could hear David breathe.

"The Guardians are going to be all over this site soon," I commented, then looked over at where the Focus lay. It was on its side, against what remained of a tree on the other side of the restaurant. "This is not good. Cars are not meant to expose their nether regions like that." I pulled myself out of the bank of snow and slid myself along the semi-firm surface. David had a bit more to do, unfortunately, but he managed better than I, since my progress was extremely slow.

"Can you sense any life under there?" David called back over his shoulder. "I think I stepped on someone…"

"Let's see," I closed my eyes and opened my senses to the pulse of human life, splicing in a Space component for exact locations. What I found was…foreboding. There were two immediately under me, but the one signal was weakening as life faded. Half a dozen more were spread out all over the place, including the one that David had stepped on.

"What're the odds that you could convince a fire spirit to melt all this snow down?"

"Not good. They migrate with the seasons. You did step on one…I think it was Chuck."

"'Was?'"

"I can't sense that one anymore. Hang on." I more or less dove into the snow, burrowing with as much alacrity as I could manage. I just needed…to…touch…_There!_ I grabbed hold of the extended hand of the person beneath me and basically crammed healing energy into their body. The signal I'd felt weakening so quickly flared into full health once again, and the hand clamped onto mine. Boosting my strength, I pulled as hard as I dared with the treacherous footing. With my legs splayed to either side and my free arm braced against the snow ahead of me, I could apply a lot of force thanks to my broadly distributed weight, but the person below added a lot more than the snow wanted to handle.

"Here," David gestured in my direction, and the snow firmed up all about me, halting my descent. It did very little for the snow immediately under my chest, and I had to strain to pull both myself and the buried victim free. She turned out to be a middle-aged woman who wept and clung to me as I drew her out of what had almost been her frigid coffin, but I had little time to stop and comfort her, as the other life below me was fading…as were all the others.

Taking a brief moment to reach into the woman's physical autonomic controls, I pushed her into a light sleeping state and dicked around with her metabolism. When she woke up she'd need to eat like a horse, but at least she wouldn't freeze to death. "David, we're losing them!"

"On it!" My friend frowned for a minute, chanting to himself as he gestured with a wand carved from a human thigh bone. I turned my eyes away; though I didn't begrudge his extracurricular activities, that didn't mean I wanted to think about the specifics of what he did.

David stopped chanting and I felt the tingling up and down my spine that indicated the working of magic nearby. Immediately the snow began to writhe and wriggle, almost seeming to boil. In a few short seconds, it exploded up and around me in a massive cloud of obscuring sleet. Within a minute it gathered neatly in a ridge surrounding the remnants of the restaurant, though there was an entire layer remaining. Fortunately it was thin, and people began to claw their way out on their own, freed from the excessive weight.

David and I nodded at each other and dashed to the car where I used my enhanced strength to carefully right it, though I needed a bit of help with it when the mass was no longer distributed so much to one side. As David laid his hands on the vehicle and began the laborious task of making it functional again - more extensive repairs could be made on the road - I looked around, getting the vague sense of something being wrong.

Where were the people who'd been buried?

That realization somehow seemed the key to snapping me out of whatever fantasy I'd been stuck in and I jerked, ramming the glass into my upper lip and spilling cranberry juice all down my face, front and lap.

"Son of a bitch," I bit off the words, using the napkin my utensils had come in to try and minimize the damage. Glancing up at David, his eyes were narrowed, but clouded over. Like me, he had his drink to his lips, so I used his napkin to keep my skin from contacting his glass and gently pulled it out of his grasp. Once he lost contact with the container he did his own little quarter-second funky chicken dance, rattling the table as his senses were redirected to normalcy.

"Fucking Christ," he gasped when he was completely back. His face was pale and sweat-streaked, but the cloudiness had passed from his eyes. "What was that?"

"You're the expert on the inanimate, you tell me," I gestured at the glasses. "Whatever it was, we have to start being more careful."

"True. You analyze us while I check these."

Nodding, I settled back and turned my attention inward, working through each of my body's systems and comparing them against how I knew they should be. There was very little wrong except a minor case of food poisoning and the beginnings of an infection from an ingrown hair on my thigh…and of course my bruised upper lip, but I eliminated the first two problems with an almost casual flicker of power and ignored my lip as an inconsequential annoyance that would repair itself on its own. When I turned my attention to David I found virtually nothing wrong with him, only similarly minor problems as I'd had.

"Anything?" He asked, to which I shook my head.

"Nothing. We're both free of any physical explanation."

"The substance of our drinks is normal." David glanced to the side, to gauge how far away the nearest potential listener was, then did something that tickled my mage-sense. "It's now very hard for anybody else to hear us. I think there might have been a spell involved, so I checked while you were busy - that takes forever, by the way - and found residue, but nothing I could make heads or tails of."

"It sounds like a triggered trap." I switched on my magesight, but I couldn't see what David had mentioned, which made it likely that we just caught the tail-end of the effect, the last sputtering of a spell running on fumes, so to speak. Or maybe it wasn't supposed to last particularly long. But the way our senses had been fooled…the way we'd been pulled into a microcosm so easily and seamlessly, it was scary. It was certainly a spell from the Mind Arcanum, but the amount of skill it would have taken relegated its use to an Adept or Master…although that was just a guess based on what I'd heard student of the Arcanum of Mind talking about.

"Possibly," David took a cautious sip of his milk, and I had to choke back an exclamation of complaint about the rashness of his action. We waited for a few minutes, and when nothing happened, I took a sip of the remainder of my juice. Again nothing happened.

David drew the juice I'd spilled back into the cup, leaving it nearly as full as before I spilled it. Together we ate, watching like hawks to ensure that neither of us succumbed to the trap if it was still active.

Since the delicate snowfall prior the hallucination had actually been real, we needed to clean off the car before setting off again, but there was so little that we only needed work for a minute or two, and I think David cheated a little.

"So where are we off to?" David asked when we settled in the car, claiming our positions from prior breakfast.

"That's a jolly-good question, lads," someone remarked from the backseat. David and I spun as one - nearly pulling an Exorcist…or at the very least giving ourselves whiplash - to stare at the little red-haired man sitting in the middle. He was short - midget-short - about four-nothing, maybe less. When the little man stood up, however, he seemed to shrink in order to allow the car to accommodate him. Or perhaps the car expanded…but there was no spatial distortion to indicate such a change. He still looked like he was about four-foot-nothing, but there wasn't that much room in the back.

Whoever he was, he was much better at wielding the Arcanum of Space than I was.

"And you are?" David asked, taking in the little man's green suit and hat, blinking as the morning sunlight glinted off his oversized golden belt-buckle. He looked like nothing so much as a clean-shaven leprechaun, but I held my tongue against giving voice to such an observation.

"Another good question," the little man grinned broadly, and with a flourish that drew a black cape - which had not been there a moment before - around from behind and hid his body for a brief moment. When the cape fluttered down from his revealed grasp, he was wearing a black, broad-brimmed hat, leather boots and gloves, and a black suit that was rather…familiar. What was most poignant about his costume was the Guy Fawkes mask…but the entire ensemble was made farcical by the shock of red hair. "Permit me - in lieu of the more commonplace soubriquet - to suggest the character of this dramatis persona." He made another flourish, this time becoming an immense pillar of flame with a dark maw and eyes of white that didn't seem to burn the interior of the car, yet my mind registered it as being several dozen feet high. In both instances I sensed no use of power…so did that mean this was part of a "programmed" message? "I am the vast, almighty, all-knowing and all-powerful Lord of the Elements, King of the Thirteen Hells, Emperor of the Seven Cosmos, and Grand Chief of the Shadow Wilds, also known as Chuck. You may call me Great Big C, however. What I am is what you are and not seeing, what you do and cannot hear."

"A hallucination," David muttered to me.

"Exactly," Chuck clapped enthusiastically when he returned to his leprechaun-form. "I'd give you a Kewpie doll if I weren't intangible. Now, down to business. I represent an organization very interested in the apprehension and subsequent, hmm…_sterilization_ of your target, whose name we shall not utter. I'm given to understand that Councilor Ka of the Ottawa Consilium has decided you are to eliminate said target, and I won't bother adding an irrelevant asking of 'correct?', being as we all understand it to be true. Ordinarily we would have few issues with the continuity of your duty as is, being as your target is a greedy gretchin that doesn't know his manners yet. In this case however, he has information we require, so we require him alive, yet impotent." Chuck made a face and corrected himself. "But that doesn't mean we want him castrated, as he would still be able to perform." Taking a huge breath and letting it out, the hallucination began again. "We want him unable to perform magic. To that end, we want you to purge his soul."

"What!?" David and I shouted at the top of our lungs.

"Do you have any idea what level of control and skill that requires?" David asked incredulously, clutching his fingers as though he wanted to throttle the hallucination, but held back only because he knew it would be fruitless.

"Not to mention the moral bomb that would erode our credibility and force others to question our dedication to the Path of Wisdom," I snapped. I forced myself to relax and release my death-grip upon the hilt of my knife. I could kill the man if it came to that, but to remove his soul? That would be torture and undue suffering, something I absolutely refused to be party to. How ruthless Ka was rumored to be paled in comparison to what this hallucination was suggesting. Tay Renee may be one of the worst kind of mage out there, but he didn't deserve to have his soul ripped out and stuffed in a jar, leaving him a hollow individual with little drive and no vitality and really only the memory of his existence as it had been, tormenting him for the rest of his soulless days.

"And beyond that our own self-respect," David added in just as sharp a tone as mine had been. "You're from a Guardian to be so callous," he growled deep in his throat. "Get out of here."

"Ah, but you haven't listened to my counter-offer," the hallucination held up an admonishing finger.

"Not interested," my friend turned to me. "Liam?"

"Thy will be done," I smirked, laying a hand on the dashboard. Magic flowed in accordance to the Imago I held in my mind, shaping itself around the car and permeating its very substance. When the spell snapped into place, the hallucination vanished, cut off by the ward I set into place. It left us with a bit of a headache that would probably fade in an hour or so, but the sender should be laid up in agony from the backlash. Spells were not meant to be broken like that, but the sender deserved it. Still…a Guardian with a sense of humor… "Take us to Winnipeg," I glared at the sky as though imagining it to be that miserable little shit who assumed us to be as lax about ethics as he was. "I'll try to get a bead on Tay when we get there, but on the way I'm going to shore up this ward so we don't get any more unwelcome visitors."

"Sounds good," David replied, pulling the car out and directing it onto the street. "Will you need an assist?"

"I'll be fine," I answered, pulling a clear glass cup out of my backpack. Drawing my knife a couple inches out of its sheath, I slashed shallowly across the meaty part of my thumb, following the grain of the muscle to minimize the odds of damaging something beyond repair. The pain that accompanied the action was part of the spell, kind of a jump-start for the mystic energies of the ritual. "You need all your concentration on the road, and I do **not** recommend trying to split it between a spell above Initiate-rank." Sinking into my seat, I let the blood from my hand pour into the cup, a representation of both Space and my own Path, another source of energy, however minimal. I guessed we had perhaps five or six hours before reaching the provincial capital, which should be more than enough time for the ward. As the power began to respond, I muttered in High Speech the words of guarding, protection and hiding, adding in those for warding, Space, and permanency. The spell would last until I chose to dismiss it, and would be yet another burden on my Supernal will, added to my ward on the apartment.

By the time we arrived in Winnipeg the ward was set and I was exhausted, having expended Mana alongside my tools to give me the best chance of as potent a spell as possible. Unfortunately, I was pretty much drained dry, an incredibly stupid decision on my part…but not as stupid as expending the energy on a meaningless objective.

"Any particular destination in mind?" David asked, pulling off the highway and onto more residential roads. I flexed my hand, the bleeding staunched, but ghost-pains still bothered me. With my other I pulled Ashvixen's maps out of my backpack from the backseat, and flipped through them until I found the one for Winnipeg. "What's that?"

"A map." I looked for the street names at the next intersection, cross-referenced them on the index on the side of the map and looked around for nearby Hallows. There was one in a couple blocks, but Ashvixen had written a little "W" beside the "H" to indicate the presence of a pack of werewolves, so there was probably a Locus there as well…a rare enough occurrence on its own, as Hallows and Loci weren't related beyond that they each produced energy, though for most mages what a Locus produced was unusable. It was important for spirits, though, being as it was essentially food and drink for them. "Make a right at the next intersection," I ordered, mentally securing our route before folding up our map. David did as I asked, and in a couple minutes we arrived at an apartment building in a roughly lower-middleclass neighborhood. I keyed in my magesight and stared at the building, dismissing it when I identified the presence of a Hallow in the basement.

"So what are we doing here?" David asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Check the resonance for yourself," I replied, opening my perceptions to identify any spirits in the area. The map was a couple years old, and if there were werewolves still in the area, then they would be a well-established pack and could therefore have any number of spiritual guardians. With my senses attuned to Twilight, I could hear a faint hum of energy, sounding almost jovial, like laughter or chuckling. That would probably be the Locus, and a good omen for its positive resonance…it would mean dealing with the werewolves - who were much more sensitive to it than I - would be easier, as the Locus itself would push them towards a good mood.

"A Hallow?" My friend looked at me curiously, an expression I noted only out the corner of my eye as I focused my efforts on discerning spirits. "How in the hell did you know there was one here?"

Lying would get me nowhere, although Ashvixen had made me promise never to show the maps to anyone in such a way that they could read them at leisure…not that they would see anything, anyway. The marks were attuned to Ashvixen's students, but they would still radiate a minor amount of Matter-resonant magic.

"Ashvixen told me. There may be a pack here, so armor up." I followed my own advice with a reinforcement of my body and went inside. The door had been left slightly ajar, held open by a lump of rock-hard gum in the latch-slot. I didn't bother dislodging it, instead focusing part of my attention on a sweep of the complex for living creatures larger than a cat. The spell encompassed the majority of the building, but it took me a couple tries to actually get it working. Forcing such an area into it made the spell a little…difficult to pull off, and adding a Space factor into the mess complicated it more than it would have normally. However, once it began working properly I gained detailed information on the exact locations and movements of virtually any organic life of a minimum size.

Six people had dogs, two in one apartment in a position that would have ordinarily made me snicker were I not walking into a potentially dangerous situation. One apartment held a large snake, though without taking the time for analysis I couldn't tell what species it was. Within the building were seventy-three humans and without a number that varied based on the people walking through my sphere of sensing. It was a cluster of six downstairs that made me think our target was downstairs. I glanced at David and spoke in a low voice.

"Can you figure out where the Hallow is?"

"Not a problem," he answered in kind, sounding a little more reserved than usual.

"You okay?"

"Yeah, it's just…" David sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. "You've been sitting on this info all this time without telling me."

"And you're feeling a little betrayed?" He nodded, and I glanced outside as a school bus drove by, the thirty-something kids suddenly flickering into, through and out of my sensory field giving me a stab of pain. "If it makes you feel any better, I made a promise to not bring it up." Amongst other things. Christ, I was getting as good as a Guardian at telling parsimonious truths.

"It doesn't really make me feel better," David wrinkled his nose. "But at least I can understand your reason. You and your fucking promises..."

"I needn't bother taking up study of the Fate Arcanum," I chuckled. "The universe doesn't need to loom over me to make me cleave to my oaths."

"Either way." He paused and slowly passed his gaze around, likely taking in the various resonances. "I think it's downstairs…there's something distorting the resonance."

"Probably the Locus," I answered, leading the way. The area of Hallow and the Locus were more or less superimposed on each other, but where the former was a font of the Supernal and needn't necessarily have a physical anchor, the Locus needed to have a physical point of reference for its power to issue forth into Twilight. If they were of similar strength, then their respective pales would be roughly the same. That much I knew from Ashvixen's lessons: despite her Mastery of the Life Arcanum, she had placed surprising emphasis on her somewhat lesser knowledge of the Arcanum of Spirit.

I stood outside the door for a long minute, replacing my enhanced-area life sense spell with the spirit-sense one I'd used outside. Even if I couldn't see them from outside, anything guarding the door should be visible, but there wasn't much beyond the potential of a door-spirit. With the energy from the Locus it could potentially become a true spirit, though tainted with the happiness resonance it could likely become an entity dedicated more to welcoming than privacy.

"Anything?"

"No," I answered, frowning. This was strange…maybe it was an entirely new pack that had taken over the territory and hadn't had time to ensure spiritual guardianship. After a moment's hesitation I knocked on the door, listening as the people inside started with likely surprise. After all, who'd come knocking at their door in an apartment building without prior notice?

I could hear somebody walk up to the door and saw the door shift slightly as a face was pressed up against the peephole. I held myself in a relaxed posture as to appear as peaceful as possible, but stiffened when my back prickled. David's inhaled breath told me that he sensed something, and his whispered "Not magic" told me the pack was doing something…but since we weren't dead or being assaulted by spirits, I supposed they were bringing their defenses to "stand-by." Though I still couldn't sense anything ephemeral taking place…

"Who is it?" The voice was male, but sounded almost congested, as though the speaker had a cold.

"One who wishes to bargain," I replied after a moment. Already I was having doubts about why I was here. I probably should've looked for a deserted Hallow, but the odds of finding one on the map that was still unclaimed were…unlikely.

There was a hurried discussion on the other side of the door, followed by a quick gust of wind as air was drawn into the apartment around the doorframe. When that settled, the door opened carefully and I almost had to paralyze the muscles of my face to keep from laughing at the first thought which crossed my mind.

_Hippy werewolves. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!_ Indeed, out of the six beings inside, three had hair that likely hadn't seen scissors since first grade, one was shaved completely bald and the other two were women whose hair was, well…average. Except for the bald one and his rather preppy garb, they were all dressed similarly in loose, gauzy clothing in eye-shattering color combinations. Two had full-length cargo pants, one had cut-off jeans, and the two women had floral-patterned calf-length skirts.

"Dude, what could you have to offer?" Asked the one who'd opened the door, and when I breathed in deeply I caught the tell-tale scent of weed. It went along with their reddened eyes.

"Like, you're not even Uratha, man," added one of the women, her curly brown hair bouncing as she giggled after saying her piece.

I heard David shift uncomfortably and resisted the urge to purse my lips. We were dealing with werewolves who were both hippy and high, and it was my fault for not wanting to look for an unattended Hallow. Taking a breath, I stepped inside and into the pale of the Hallow, sensing the resonance of happiness and allowing it to wash past and through me. The Locus did the same, but it was subtler since mages weren't strictly attuned to the ebb and flow of Essence.

"I'm not Uratha, no," I agreed with the curly-haired woman, paying attention to the sudden stillness of the two men on the couch against the wall and to the right. The window outside was just above them, but there wasn't much snow in evidence, suggesting that they'd had it open to vent the apartment. As I stepped further inside with careful steps, David followed just as warily, shutting the door behind at my gesture. The gesture of intrusion was a negative, I knew…but my habits as a mage and the deeply ingrained need for secrecy made me more inclined to step on toes in order to keep those secrets. "Neither is my friend, Garrote," I gestured at David, inwardly wincing as I redirected their attention, but it would be exceedingly rude not to introduce us after having the gall to simply barge into their territory. "I am Nightfire." Politeness decreed that I give them our names. Our shadownames would suffice. "There is a font of energy here we wish to partake of."

The pack bristled as the bald man raised a lazy eyebrow at us. "You aren't touching the Locus."

"I have no interest in that, for there is another here more important to our kind and useless to yours." The other woman inhaled sharply, and my eyes flicked to her before returning to the bald man. He might have been the leader, he might not. Either way it served to consider him in a position of authority until such time as the actual hierarchy was clarified. Teratology - the study of monsters - wasn't exactly my strong point, but in learning the basics of the Arcanum of Spirit I had been expected to research various phenomena that weren't strictly under what could be affected with said Arcanum, but could still pose as either threat or complication to my works. Werewolves fell smack-dab centre of that category, so I knew a bit more about them than the average mage. I knew a bit of their history, that their abilities were fairly shamanistic in that they were granted by spirits, and that they held to a pack when in groups, which included a powerful hierarchy. An Adamantine Arrow could probably relate to them better because they both swore to a hierarchy, so I was at a disadvantage in that way…but perhaps it wouldn't matter.

By speaking as I was, I'd taken the reins of power for this little engagement, and thus the responsibility. The manner in which I was taking this little exchange - and hopefully to seal the bargain - would be hotly contested were the specifics ever made common knowledge, and David's presence at my back forced me to think about how I could ask him to keep yet another secret, this time from our own Order.

Perhaps this would be my first step onto the path of an apostate.


	7. Chapter 7

Three days after the werewolves agreed to the terms of our bargain, David managed to find the first clue about Tay Renee's loc

Three days after the werewolves agreed to the terms of our bargain, David managed to find the first clue about Tay Renee's location. Or at least where he had been. It was in a tiny newspaper article just before the classifieds, no more than two inches square. The article mentioned that one man had been killed in "ritual fashion, as though the work of a Satanic cult."

What made it interesting was when David took a quick scry of the crime scene, he found Atlantean runes seared into the wall, though the article had mentioned only scorch marks. There was little special about said runes, though they were scattered at the five points of the Atlantean pentagram and detailed the gross/subtle pairs of Arcana at each point. There was no body at the scene, but a lot of blood and CSI-type stuff. I had little idea what it did aside from what I may have absorbed through osmosis while watching the TV-show CSI, but as I'd been reminded repeatedly, there was a dramatic element added to the show to make the information one might have learned from it somewhat false or too dressed up for the real elements to exist freely.

Then again, disseminating such information the series could prove interesting practice of the same regarding the Supernal truths hidden in the world at large.

Either way, I had little to do with the investigation this time because, as David said so often, of me and my "fucking promises." In making the bargain with the werewolves to gain access to the Hallow I had been maneuvered into swearing an oath of service. Even though neither David nor I had any knowledge of the Arcanum required to make such oaths permanent, the universe tended to pay more attention to mages who swore oaths than it would to a mortal who spoke the exact words with the same intent behind it.

On the plus side, the service wasn't a predetermined length of time, and it was only one task. The negative was that it had been open-ended, so they had leave to call on me at any time. It was a mixed blessing that we found evidence of Tay's presence…or at least of a mage following a Left-Handed Path, while at the same time the werewolves decreed it was time for me to help them. So…either I could fulfill my oath and aid the werewolves with whatever endeavor they needed me for, or I could hunt for clues about a murderous mage who may have been our target and may not have been.

Not really a decision at all.

I arrived at the pack's apartment fully charged with Mana and virtually thrumming from the energy coursing throughout my body. It felt as though I could sense my very Pattern singing with vigor. The experience was not unlike the first time I'd actually had my reserves filled utterly, about a month after Ashvixen started letting me actually cast spells.

The pack was in battle regalia - slim-fitting clothing with numerous pockets and thin steel plates woven between two layers - and they looked very little like the relaxed toking hippies they had been. With their armor and now being so, well…groomed, they actually looked intimidating, as though an army of long-haired special-ops.

"Alright, I'm here," I raised an eyebrow in interest as the door closed shut behind me, despite there being nobody to have done so. A quick glance into Twilight revealed the pack's apartment had at some point gained an ephemeral presence…several of them. I recognized only one as a guardian-spirit tethered to the apartment, and the others were too obscure for my body of knowledge. The only thing I could read were their bindings, bound to the apartment, to the building, and one seemed under a geas connected to the neighborhood, but I couldn't be certain without canvassing the block.

"Yes, you are here," Darien said dryly, a comment acerbic in that it chastised my statement of the obvious. He was the bald guy, and my instincts had been correct in assuming that he was the pack's alpha. "It's time for you to fulfill your end of the bargain."

"Sounds fair," I muttered. "What do you want me to do?"

"We know you've got the skills necessary to open a road into the Shadow," the alpha continued. "We need you to do so, and at midnight tonight you are to open it again. That will discharge your obligation."

I pinched the bridge of my nose, attempting to stave off a sudden headache from the thought of even the mere timing. Creating the road would take at least an hour, and the end result would last only a few seconds. That meant it needed to be large enough for these guys to get through all at once, unless I put forth the supreme effort needed to make it last longer or increase its capacity. Grimacing, I said as much to the pack, and informed them that the longest I could get the road to open - realistically - was perhaps a minute, and that only if I spent an entire afternoon on the matter. The absolute maximum I could spend casting was six hours - after that the spell would go to pieces and…bad things could happen - and it would reflect badly if after that long the energy I managed to accrue failed to make the Imago reality. Within that span of time I could possibly make the road last up to five minutes, but it was inadvisable and regardless of the result I'd be more or less burned out for working any magic until I had a rest.

"So what I'm saying is that if you'd told me what you wanted a little earlier you could be in the Shadow already, doing whatever it is you need to do." I wrinkled my nose and strode purposefully into the kitchen. "No matter. Darien, I'm going to let you watch the spell so that you can get the others through it quickly when it resolves completely."

"What do you mean by 'let'?" He asked archly. None of the werewolves especially trusted me, and to be honest…I couldn't really blame them. Mages aren't known for their meddlesome ways for nothing.

Instead of answering the alpha I pointed at him and channeled a spell into place, a form of Spirit-based Magesight keyed to his vision, rather than any other sense. At least with his sight he could simply close his eyes to ignore the patterns of resonance. The action of enhancing his senses thusly was…discouraged amongst the Awakened. It was looked upon as sharing secrets with the uninitiated, but I viewed werewolves as initiates of their own way, keepers of their own secrets. I knew most mages wouldn't see it that way, but then most of them were either selfish or self-righteous, doing what they did in the name of the good of all but keeping personal gain foremost in their minds.

Darien stood completely still, his mouth slightly agape as he perceived resonance for the first time in his life. All of reality had a resonance, and it could get pretty overwhelming for one such as he, who wasn't used to it.

While he adjusted I chanted a few short words of High Speech and bent my will upon the Gauntlet, the border between the material realm and the Shadow. Ordinarily I wouldn't have been able to do so, but the presence of the Hallow allowed me to affect the Gauntlet and - in this case - weaken it.

Kneeling, I used my knife to slash across my palm and dipped a finger into the blood which welled up. Ignoring the urge to clutch my hand to my chest and howl, I drew the Atlantean runes for the spell to help with the length of time it would stay open, then sealed the wound with a healing spell that drew power from the Hallow juxtaposed with the Locus. The sensation was…happiness. I felt a little giddier from the resonance tinting the Hallow, though it was likely contamination from the Locus…the good kind of contamination.

Darien began calming down just about the time I finished chanting for the road into Shadow, now focusing on the magic I was working.

I had to hand it to the pack: they knew what they were about. When I'd arrived here I'd have had almost no clue how to create a gate between this world and the next. The next day they'd inadvertently given me one of the keys to unlocking the greater Practices, and by the second day I had become a Third-degree Disciple. That didn't mean I was particularly good at it, being as I still needed some practice sorely in order to get more proficient with the laws I could now draw down. And somehow, by some arcane manner I had no insight toward, the pack managed to find out about my advancement.

It wasn't fair…

The gate into the Shadow began with simple framework: a broad arch wide enough for two to walk abreast. This meant it was roughly the width of the kitchen, and certainly tall enough for me to walk through. Due to vagaries of the spell I wasn't completely certain of, I needed to be seated in front of the gate, facing its opening. The details of the arch expanded as a pair of doors came into focus, more simply two panels that took over half of the arch each. Nobody without Magesight could have seen the details coming into play, and wouldn't have even known the gate was there until they walked through it. In the last few minutes of the ritual, with sweat dripping down my brow from the effort of such an unfamiliar task I began to chant again, and runes flowed across the floor from my shadow and up along the doors, covering the two panels entirely with glowing glyphs. It was a simple repeating message, the only piece of artistic inflation I'd allowed myself.

They spelled out "Danger, Spirits Ahead."

As I spoke the last syllable and the final rune flowed into place, the distortions around the edge of the gate stabilized and the doors slid open. In an instant Darien and the others marched, walking through carefully and fading before my eyes. Just as the last one - the curly-haired woman, named Mona - walked through, I sensed a presence appear behind me, and before I could react I was picked up and thrown through the gate and into the backs of the pack.

Even as they protested my intrusion I had my Magesight up and ready, analyzing the strength of the Gauntlet. It went from "barely there" to "nearly impenetrable" in about two seconds, speaking to the strength of the caster on the other side. I wanted so desperately to get through and eviscerate whoever was on the other side, but there was little I could do. My preliminary attempts at reducing the barrier amounted to nothing, my spells incapable of "getting a hold" on the barrier by which they could reduce it.

Swearing colorfully, I stalked back and forth within the pack's apartment while they went on high alert, the two women even going so far as to take a step away from their entirely human bodies.

"What's wrong?" Darien asked, an eyebrow raised. "Why did you come through?"

"I was thrown through," I muttered darkly. Unfortunately, the "grip" had been felt everywhere, so it was more likely a spell that had sent me through my gate, rather than brute physical strength. And who was most likely to have a problem with me than the mage I'd been trailing?

My armor came up almost of its own volition, Spirit-based this time rather than originating from my knowledge of the Arcanum of Life.

"So I take it there's small chance of getting back safely?" Mona asked, her curly hair pulled back in a top-knot.

"Not so much 'safely' as 'anytime soon,'" I corrected, drawing my knife. In this place, it would be best to be ready…or so my lessons with Ashvixen had taught me. "Look…I'm going to be stuck here for a while until I've had a chance to rest up, so for safety's sake would you mind if I stuck around with you until you're done?"

"It couldn't hurt," Rebecca, the other woman stated slowly. "It shifts the schedule up."

"If we're fortunate," Greg put in, one of the three hippy-type guys. There was no sense of the surfer/toker accent he'd put on for the benefits of appearance. None of this pack was what they seemed at first glimpse. They could've put a Guardian to shame.

"Fortune favors those who strive," Darien stated flatly, then nodded at me. "You may accompany us under my leadership."

"Done." The alpha seemed somewhat taken aback at the rapidity of my response, and I shrugged at his arched eyebrow. "Whatever you order me will have a risk, but it won't be suicidal. You can't afford to have someone at your back whom you've slighted."

"It's 'who,' not 'whom,'" Rebecca murmured, but I didn't rise to the bait. I imagined this sort of bickering was necessary to establish pecking order, but a certain aloofness was in order to maintain the illusion of my composure. Inside of course, it irked me to be corrected, but the English language is my bitch most of the time. It's allowed to get its slaps in every so often as my knowledge wavers.

"Fair reasoning," Darien nodded. "Alright, we're here to hunt a very dangerous spirit. It's established a territory a couple blocks north, and therefore within ours. That's a bad thing to do."

"Any idea of its choir and rank?"

"We're guessing it's at least of Jaggling rank, as it has acted in ways that don't seem to apply to the Descant of Murder."

"An Ideological…" That meant fast, and a spirit of that particular descant would typically use its influence to try and force people to murder one another, generating Essence of that nature. "I'd heard Winnipeg's homicides this year had nearly tripled. How're you going to eliminate it? Spirits simply discorporate when their bodies are destroyed."

"One would think a mage would know the answer to that question," commented Frost - the second of the long-haired trio whose real name I'd never learned…or perhaps that was his real name.

"One would expect Uratha to understand that very few know everything," I answered loftily, turning back to an amused Darien. "While we're on the subject of ignorance, I don't understand what you meant by the rank you described it as, either."

Darien calmly explained, suppressing a little smirk. "A Jaggling is one or two steps below being a minor god, depending on whether it's of the lesser or greater variety."

"Ah, we refer to such beings as either Barons or Counts." Darien nodded at my answer, as though I'd said something that increased my standing. He said something to Mona in a language I couldn't quite understand, jerked his head in my direction, and sent the third long-haired guy - Mikey - of ahead to scout. Before he took two steps he shifted and transformed into a rather large example of a wolf, recalling to mind the days of yore where the stories of wolves inflated their size until a single such animal could easily take on a mob of men. Perhaps the Uratha were to blame for that…or rather, responsible for it. To say they were to blame was to determine a fault.

Darien partnered me with Frost and took up Rebecca as his partner while Greg stalked with Mona. While we moved warily onward, Frost explained to me the Uratha-way of ranking spirits, and I did the same with the Awakened manner. He was quite civil when he realized I wouldn't rise to his bait and react with anger, but occasionally he'd say something sharply if I asked a question he considered stupid…or vice-versa. I doubted he'd be the kind of person I'd ever want as a friend, but we could work together with mutual respect.

The pack and I moved on in a staggered group, stalking through the streets and passing by spirits engaged in their socialization and caring very little about us so long as we passed by without affecting them or their goals. Their language was whispery and just on the edge of my hearing…had I been so inclined I could have given myself the ability to understand what they said, but that would be just another spell that would push at my tolerance.

I recognized immediately when we arrived in our target's territory: the buildings and city trees looked more menacing, there weren't as many spirits, and there were odd glyphs that appeared to have been drawn in blood. Evidently those were border markers, and the werewolves snarled as we crossed them, but otherwise nobody said anything.

They didn't have to. The pack's entire demeanor changed completely. If I'd thought they looked dangerous before, that was nothing compared to now. They all shifted forms, becoming slightly more bestial in their features, and each exhale was accompanied with a low growl I'm not even sure they were aware of. For my part I was surprised to find myself breathing harder, harsher. It was as though I were trying to emulate the pack's growling. For a brief moment I flashbacked to my Awakening, reliving for an instant the thrill of hunting the Watchtower of the Stone Book and the fear of being hunted.

We spread out as the sensation of menace and the smell of blood became stronger. The ephemeral mist - which pervaded all of the Shadow - prevented the sun's counterpart from shining as brightly as in the Material realm, but even that effect seemed to grow stronger, bringing the typically dawn-like level of light to more "foggy full moon." Whatever this spirit was, it couldn't be simply a Jaggling/Baron. These sorts of effects, although not specifically within my range of experience, were part of a crash course class I'd attended last year called the Theorum of the Shadow. Were I even an Initiate of Mind I'm sure I'd be able to sense the emotional resonances of anger and death and fear. As it was I could detect vague hints of them just from the way it made me feel, sort of like the manner in which scientists detected the natural, unobserved movement of particles based on how it affected other particles.

Forcing myself to breathe normally, I concentrated on creating an Imago, clarifying it up to the point where I'd usually apply my will, but instead letting it dissipate and putting together another. The practice was advised for those who'd recently begun learning a new Arcanum, but it was a good focusing technique. I was in the middle of the third repetition of a particularly difficult visualization - difficult because it was a complete shapeshift and I didn't know all of the laws governing it…yet - when a pack of spirits broke atop us and the pack scattered to do battle.

They were pain and murder spirits of a lesser ranking than that suspected of the ultimate target, but that didn't make them any less dangerous. I was fortunate that I'd used the ephemeral armor, rather than trusting to a mere body-reinforcement. The werewolves weren't so lucky, but it seemed their wounds healed within moments anyway. Either way, I was quickly cut off and had to really work to even counter some of their attacks. As Ideological spirits, these were fast little shits that quickly outflanked me, and their forms were mutable. This meant they had no problems with transforming parts of their body into blades or skewers, but it also meant they defied description and their constant shifting was giving me a headache.

Help came in the form of a loud battle-cry from above that distracted the spirits, followed by a gust of wind and a frighteningly black scythe slicing one of the murder spirits in two. The entity discorporated in an impressive display of blood and a dying scream of indeterminate gender ending in a gurgle issued forth from the remains. I followed the shaft of the scythe to David's grip, unconsciously wiping a bit of ephemeral blood from my face and noting the cloud of shadow that gathered behind David and rose above his shoulders. They twitched and spread, resolving into a pair of shadowy wings that provided a bit of thrust as he slashed at the next spirit - this of pain - carving off a chunk of its being.

"Liam," he growled, parrying the spirit's returning strike and missing with his next. "You're doing such a wonderful job just **standing there**!" In response I dashed in and ripped into the pain-spirit's body, my knife followed by a number of razor blades and needles that seemed to represent the spirit's blood. "Spell of Fraying, damnit!"

"Right," I withdrew a few paces to cast the spell, but the third spirit was expecting that and wrapped a bloody limb around my neck and dragged me back and off my feet while I stabbed at it for all I was worth. I finally managed to put together enough of an Imago to put a command on it, and gave the simple order to "Release me." It did so willingly enough, succumbing to the trap of the spell, and I dropped half a story from where the murder-spirit had been slowly drifting upwards with me. I managed to roll a bit when I hit the ground, but I still felt something in my leg twinge in the not-pain that told me I'd really fucked something up but the adrenaline would keep me from feeling it for a bit.

"Dammit," David pointed, and his shadow-wings suddenly became javelins of darkness, and I had no doubt they would put just about anything to shame. Those shafts pierced the spirit through-and-through, trailing bits of its corpus after it as they extended further. The murder-spirit began oozing its way to the side - more like a vaguely humanoid-shaped mass of blood right now than anything it had been previous. Like a mass of blood with a big straw shoved through the middle and moved to the side, its edges smoothed over as it came away from the shadowy javelins, and once it was free David recalled them. By this time I'd sounded out the three Greater Glyphs of Restoration and sent a rush of healing energy into my leg, repairing it as good as new.

The murder-spirit drew back a limb and punched it forward…and on well past where it should have been stopped by the confines of its volume of substance. This designated the attack as a blast Numina, as did the fact that the spear of blood became a nearly solid stream of long, thin and pointed blades. Since the attack was aimed at David he took action by curling his shadow-wings around and blocked part of the strike, but bits and pieces got through as evidenced by his grunts of pain.

In response I knelt down on one knee, bending my will into this new magical effort. Drawing my fingers together across the ground, as though I were pinching a cloth to pick it up, I pulled my hand away and with it came a stream of the ephemera that made up the street. The inanimate substance gathered and reshaped in my hand, and I shifted the positioning of my fingers until I was pantomiming holding something cylindrical. With a whisper of motion the ephemera became a straight-bladed sword with a long hilt and a single edge. I would've preferred to make a katana, but it'd been some time since I'd practiced with one, so the more familiar would have to do.

Once the transformation of ephemera was complete I sheathed my knife, swung the blade and sliced through the stream of the murder-spirit's attack. Ordinarily that wouldn't have done much except interrupt the flow for a split second, but coupled with a burst of power along the physical connection I now had with the offensive entity, I managed to send enough of a disruptive strike of my own at the spirit that it not only cut off the attack, but was also distracted enough for gravity to regain its hold. That was all the span of time David needed to fly forward along the ground and end the spirit's existence…temporarily. Such entities are extremely difficult to completely kill because so long as they maintain even the slightest portion of their energy - Essence - they can come back together within a day or so of their physical "death."

If only mages could do the same.

The pack finished the last spirit of their own, but from the way they took care to drain it of its power before dealing the finishing blow, I doubted many of their opponents would be coming back.

"You could have handled that better," David murmured quietly as we walked back to the pack. I grimaced in response, well aware of that. The only excuse I had was my extreme newness to this new level of expertise. Intellectually I knew what I should do, but I wasn't used to working with spirits, and my first reactions were shit unless against living things that experienced pain.

"How did you get here?" I changed the subject, certain the werewolves would want to know as well. "I thought you could only get to Twilight on your own."

"I walked into a Verge," he snorted. "Not an accidental one, of course. I saw three Sleepers walk through the same area and somehow I'm the only one who managed to slip between the worlds."

"Sounds less like a Verge and more like a gate," I pursed my lips. "A Verge you have to will yourself across…well, we have to. Sleepers kind of slip back and forth until they get out of the area."

"So somebody made a gateway into the Shadow just exactly to bring me across?"

I gave him a look, and he paled with a little bit more than his injuries. By then the adrenaline faded enough for him to actually feel the pain, and I brushed a hand across his shoulder with an accompanying wave of healing energy. He breathed more easily as the pain from his wounds evaporated and left - I assume - smooth skin where once had been slashes, gashes and punctures.

"Thanks. Tay?"

"He threw me through the gate I made to bring them across," I pointed with my chin at the pack. "Or so I assume. It could be some other malevolent mage who knows we're here and knows you and I work together. What would you say the odds are on that one?"

"Low, whatever they are. I don't have any enemies and you stay so close to the farthest edge of the Awakened social circles that you don't know enough people to have enemies."

"Thanks. Like I need a reminder of my antisocial tendencies."

"Keeps you thinking. Hello, Darien," David nodded to the pack's leader, a bit extravagant with his shadowy wings and scythe of a material so black no light escaped it. Predictably, Darien asked for the reason behind David's presence, and I explained with part of the truth, disdaining to add our suspicions at potentially being hunted by our own prey.

No need to concern them just yet.

There was always the possibility that whoever had forced my friend and I into the Shadow was not entirely malevolent, but I wasn't willing to bet money on that. Anybody who could open a gate at a moment's notice was…typically an Adept of the Arcanum of Spirit. I wasn't ignorant of other ways for someone to make such an aperture, but neither was I particularly knowledgeable of them. I simply knew that other methods existed for achieving a similar result.

More or less satisfied, Darien inducted David into the pack in much the same fashion as he had me - simply stating that my friend was following the alpha's orders - and led us off again. We had several more skirmishes with packs of spirits though none were as severe as that first engagement, but we had little luck in coming across the pack's target.

That's not to say we didn't come face-to-face with it, just that our chance encounter was not so, ah…fortunate. We literally turned a corner and found ourselves facing a monstrous example of a murder spirit, but there were blades and faint screams of terror issuing from it which made me think it was not just a murder-spirit anymore.

"Magath," Darien spat, and as if that was a cue, the pack shifted into what looked like the hybrid form of a D&D werewolf, but much, much meaner-looking. Mean as they looked, though…the spirit was nastier.

The pack dashed in with tooth and claw and struck as one, causing the multi-theme spirit to recoil in pain then lash out with bloody, bladed pseudopodia.

As I stared in awe at the massive beast, I felt something pressed into my hand and reflexively closed my fingers around it. When I looked at it, I found a grimoire about the size of an average paperback. David gave me a look, and murmured in a voice I heard only barely over the sounds of battle, "Between us, you're the only one who can use that grimoire. There's a spell in there that'll allow you to discern this thing's Ban. Use it, and know that you'll be giving me lessons in the Spirit Arcanum after this bullshit is done because I'm sick of being so handicapped." With that last ironic comment, he used his shadowy wings to fly - which I couldn't do - at the spirit and slash at it with a pitch-black scythe - that I couldn't replicate except in the Shadow - and pick off little bits of its ephemeral flesh.

Taking David's advice, I flipped through the book, fixing each symbol in my mind while chanting the accompanying words of High Speech. This spell seemed…it required knowledge of laws beyond my expertise!

Power thrummed through my body, vibrating my bones and calling evanescent choirs to sing throughout my nimbus. Ordinarily, when working powerful magic my nimbus flared up with a number of states of arousal, anywhere from an adrenaline rush to a sexual high, and typically a mix of the two. This was…different. My nimbus became visible as a faint glow across my flesh, but I was already committed to the spell and the rest came in a rush almost against my will. At its completion I felt the telltale _snap_ of reality colliding with the laws I was guessing into place, but there was no real visible sign of Paradox.

_Oh, Goddess, please don't let it be a manifestation!_

In my mind's eye I saw the spirit-amalgamate recoiling from a hand shrouded in an emerald glow. Since I'd always associated that particular hue with healing, perhaps it was no surprise that I drew the conclusion that healing the spirit was its Ban…or healing in general, since on second glimpse it seemed to concentrate on werewolves that hadn't just been struck.

I wrinkled my nose at the book before stuffing it into one of my pockets, ran my finger over the edge of my ephemera-sword to release some blood, and sent a mystical call out into the Shadow, enhanced with the power from the blood and the pain and modified with some Space-components to spread the call over a wider area. The first spirit the call encountered that matched the descant I was looking for would be compelled to come to me as fast as possible, and since I was looking for something that might be considered an Ideological then barriers should pose no problem.

With the call issued all that needed to be done now was to wait, but with my friend and the pack battling the beast I couldn't simply stand around and wait. Casting one last spell to boost my strength I dashed into the fray, keeping low and using hit-and-run tactics to keep from getting hit.

As above, so below, and vice-versa. David performed his own swooping strikes, in turns using the weapon he'd made prior joining the battle and manipulating the quality and substance of the surrounding shadows - of which there were a lot - to create entropic spears flung by his mutable wings.

The pack eventually caught on to our tactics, but to ensure the destruction of the amalgamate spirit required using techniques that failed to address the need for celerity. Their methods required them to catch and maintain a hold on the entity, rather than being free to dance around its strikes as David and I could.

So we did our best to keep the spirit's attention on us, but it was somewhat inevitable that it would focus more on the beings draining it of that which would allow it to reform.

By the time I realized this I also realized that my call for assistance had gone unanswered, so it was up to me to produce the spirit's Ban. Grimacing, I stabbed my hand into one of the entity's supporting pseudopodia and released as tiny a burst of restorative energy into it as I could. The exercise was going to be counterproductive anyway, but I could try to minimize the effect.

It recoiled from me and if it had had a head I would've said that it was looking at me in shock, then definite malice. That last I could tell from the way it suddenly refocused on me and slammed a bloody tentacle into my chest. Fortunate for me that I had my armor to reduce the effect of the impact to simply hurling me across the street, but I lost my sword in transit.

As I shakily stood up I watched as plumes of…something bled away from the spirit, and belatedly realized as it charged toward me that it was losing energy. It stopped quite suddenly, though, freezing in mid-motion. Just as I started to breathe again it moved, falling forward to land on its "face." David hovered above it, holding the scythe as though its blade had been buried in the creature's corpus. He retracted it and glided over to land beside me, sending a breeze to toy with my hair and clothes.

"You okay?" he asked me, a grounding hand on my shoulder.

"I'll sur-" I didn't get the chance to finish the statement when the spirit exploded into a torrent of blood. After that I spent a full minute retching, trying to get the taste of conceptual blood out of my mouth. Since I'd been in mid-word and facing the spirit I'd gotten a face-full - and everywhere else-full - of the stuff, which tasted absolutely awful in comparison with the real thing.

Yech.

After that things moved fairly quickly. Whoever had kept the Gauntlet so strong had relinquished their hold over it, so I had little trouble creating a very wide road back to the material realm. We'd backtracked to the pack's apartment, and as soon as we stepped across the ephemeral blood we'd been soaked in dissolved completely.

I still had a bad taste in my mouth, though.

Fortune smiled upon us, for we exited at almost the perfect time to catch the Hallow spouting up fresh Mana. David and I performed an oblation to absorb it before we left, thanking the pack for their hospitality and their permission in letting us use their Hallow…though I was of a mind to return with magics that would allow me to collect the Mana without my presence being strictly necessary. Ah, well…plans for a future date.

In turn the werewolves thanked us for their aid, and it went unsaid that had we not helped their pack might be short a member or two. As it was, Darien was nursing a broken arm and Greg would be breathing shallowly for a few hours until his ribs healed…all of them.

We took our leave and walked down the path to the sidewalk and the Focus, and needless to say I was surprised when we were approached by three police officers.

"Liam Faren?" the nearest asked, his nametag identifying him as Officer Rowling. I nodded carefully, warily. He nodded to his compatriots and two rushed me, driving me into the snow and roughly handcuffing my hands behind my back while David stood, needlessly blocked by the third, too stunned to react. "You are under arrest for the murder of Tay Renee."


	8. Chapter 8

I was searched with ruthless efficiency and given that until just moments prior the activity I'd had my knife, many thanks went to David for his quick thinking in teleporting both my knife and its sheath to his own person. It would not do for the cops to find a weapon on me, even with Ka's exemptions.

"You have the right to remain silent." Rowling began the formulaic phrase clearly as he attempted to drag me to my feet. My time practicing with Ashvixen let me stand up straight the instant I felt him begin to pull at my arms. Since I didn't try to flee, he paused audibly before continuing the little speech. "Anything you say can and will be used in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you can't afford one, one will be appointed to you by the crown."

Considering that Canada is _supposed_ to be its own nation, I can't understand why we maintain these unnecessary and nonsensical ties of apparent subservience to a tiny little island-country on the other side of the Atlantic. For that logic, we should still be sending our prisoners to Australia. Oh, my pride in being Canadian overwhelms me at times.

The officers led me to their cruiser, a few lengths ahead of the Focus, and from there drove me to the station, whereupon I gave up my personal effects, with the exception of my boots…they'd mysteriously become Velcro-fastened. More of David's magic, I imagined. Normally the police would have taken the laces so I couldn't hang myself or choke somebody, never mind that in the former situation they couldn't possibly hold my weight, and in the latter I had more effective ways of killing someone than mere strangulation.

I was given my phone call immediately, which I didn't hesitate to use to call Councilor Ka's office. There was little chance that he was in, so I expected to speak with Ulfman instead. Neither picked up.

A very familiar voice issued out of the earpiece. "Hello, Liam," I heard my voice say from the other end. Nerveless fingers threatened to drop the phone and only weapons training kept me gripping the receiver hard. "Councilor Ka is out at the moment, as is Secretary Ulfman. I thought we could use this time for a little chat."

I'd been in that office. The stress of that particular situation had burned it into my memory, and my training as a Sneak let me instinctively sense the cracks in reality ever-present since either the dawn of time, or the fall of Atlantis. Either way, I forced my will into a crack immediately in front of me and wedged it open. To anyone else watching I would appear to be raising the middle and index fingers of my left hand together to cover my eye on the same side, then scissoring them apart. The end result was similar to the scrying spell, but it wouldn't register as magical…only supernatural. With luck it should bypass any wards on Ka's office.

It seemed fortune was smiling on me…or at least offering a half-grin, since I managed to get an eyeful of the owner of my voice. He was identical to me, down to the flat mole on my left cheek. His expression was unlike anything I'd ever contorted my features into, however…a sort of sadistic glee with a manic gleam in his eyes. With a sinking sensation in my stomach I thought back to no more than a few hours ago, when my spell to analyze the big murder spirit had fucked with reality…more than I had, at any rate. But nothing had seemed to happen.

This appeared to be the result: a doppelganger.

From my perspective, I seemed to be looking at the being from across the room and near the ceiling, but that didn't matter. The doppelganger had been looking at his fingers when I first looked in, yet his eyes were drawn inexorably to meet mine and he shook an admonishing finger at me.

"Tsk tsk, Liam. That was a bad idea." The doppelganger snapped his fingers, and the crack was forcibly closed on me. Had it been a spell the backlash would have been horrific, akin to what I'd done to the Guardian and her leprechaun hallucination a few days ago. As it was I had a headache starting up and the tips of my fingers were sore, as though burned. I bit back a curse and contemplated dropping a skunk into the office in retribution, but knowing the little I did about such supernatural entities I had a feeling that this doppelganger would be able to handle the skunk exactly the same as I would in his position.

Instead of reacting so negatively I hung up the phone carefully and gently, an obvious sign to anyone who knew me of how angry I was. Realistically I knew it was my fault - and therefore my responsibility - but I still wanted to blame somebody, to cause pain and suffering to somebody else.

So I allowed myself to be taken to a holding cell filled with half a dozen people waiting for whatever was going to happen to them, be it transportation to an actual prison facility or release pending proof of wrongful accusation or bail. Of the six, one was white, one was black, and four native. On the basis of the state of their garb and estimated amount of unkempt beard-growth, I'd estimate the black guy as being the most likely to be declared as innocent. He was big, but dressed in a business suit, and his features were sort of generic for his race.

The white guy was a typical bum and probably in for public intoxication or something…though considering the season it was unlikely that he'd be drunk and outdoors.

As to the native guys, well…it sounds racist, but they were roughly typical examples of the joke "What's the difference between a park bench and a native man? A park bench can support a family." These were the kind of trash that gave native people a reputation so bad as to be made fun of. Slovenly dress, half-assed and scraggly beards. Plaid.

They were - how shall I put this delicately? - wretched filth whose mere presence defaced and fouled the legacy of their people prior the white man's second intrusion upon this continent.

I took a seat on a bench and activated my life-sense spell, filtering everything except humans, and with the almost obligatory Space-component I had a read on everybody within twenty feet. Combined with it was a pre-emptive spell of the Shielding practice to shore up my body's physiology; this was a prison cell, after all. From there I had nothing to do but wait, unable to check on David's progress due to the car's warding field. Fortunately, I'd be able to see him when he left it, so I checked every few minutes, not bothering to do more than that.

Not that I really could…with six witnesses who were almost without a doubt Sleepers, Paradox would be a guarantee after attempting anything overtly supernatural. I suppose I could have put them all to sleep, though the odds of managing it seamlessly were low, and what would the point be? I couldn't escape from prison without putting some severe black marks on my record - I may be a mage, but I'm still part of the world - and what sort of spell would require me to knock six people out? The only reason I could want to do that is to practice blood-sacrifice, and while I might have a government-issued exemption for killing Tay Renee the same could not be said of innocent people.

If Tay really was dead however, I still had to play the role of "hunter" to eliminate my doppelganger. This would require research, and that would require access to a library with information on doppelgangers. Maybe with books on the Abyss, as well…few as such items were.

That train of thought bled into speculation as to who'd put into the renegade whatever had killed him. From there various scenarios as to how the original showdown might have taken place floated across my mind's eye like little bubbles slowly drifting past a diver's mask.

I ignored the words of the others in the cell with me, most of my awareness focused on plans for how to deal with the doppelganger. There was a small sliver of attention concentrated solely on the awareness-spell, so when I noted slow movement toward me from the native guy sitting farthest away from me I reflexively put all the plans on the backburner and prepared a nasty little surprise for the prick by coating the palm of my right hand in the same sort of little tines as found on a stinging nettle plant's leaves. Visually there was very little to notice except for sparse little white hairs.

The native guy was almost on top of me when I slapped him. My hand's path trailed across his face and I'm sure it wiped a decade of grease from his face, but he immediately shouted and began clawing at his face as the little tines began working their way into his flesh. His cries drew the attention of the attending officer, whose critical eye appeared to identify the problem from the rashes appearing on the native guy's face, and at that point went to get another cop to take my victim to wash his wounds with the careful advice that he had to use plenty of soap. The guard narrowed his eyes at me, but otherwise didn't say anything as he went to his desk to await the return of the other two.

The remaining natives watched me warily, but the black guy obviously knew I'd done nothing but make a preemptive strike and the white guy was lost in his own little world. Since the spell was no longer necessary I eliminated it and went back to waiting and planning.

Two hours they kept me in that fucking cell. **Two**! I may not have a lot of experience with this level of the judicial system - or any level of it, for that matter - but surely it doesn't take two goddamn hours to verify a license to kill!

In that time the black man was let out and a curious scry informed me that he'd been held due to a case of mistaken identity, was apologized to for the error, and essentially dismissed. The white guy was taken to a detox tank with no spoken notes about reasons for or about, and I didn't feel like expending the energy necessary to find out what the hell was wrong with him. I'd changed my position several times, eventually resolving to find a massage therapist somewhere and schedule an entire day. Maybe a spa…

"Liam Faren?" I looked up at the officer near the cell door and nodded slowly. "You're free to go. Everything's been verified."

"Probably something else entirely to have to ascertain the veracity of one of those," I murmured, stepping through the door the officer held open. She was shorter than me by perhaps a foot and a half, but she was built like a brick shithouse so my usual "can I take her/would I lose?" thought was "no/yes". The officer closed the door and led me to pick up my personal effects and give me the empty apology with a flat face that told me she wasn't too happy about being ordered to let a killer go.

David was waiting in the lobby for me, and when I came up to him he nodded once and we continued on outside. On the sidewalk I checked my boots - laces now - and wrinkled my nose as I considered how to explain to him that I had a doppelganger running around.

"So I had a look at the body before coming to get you." David said this in a tone more properly relegated to discussion about weather, and only my automatic impulse to keep pace with him kept me from stopping in mid-step and likely tumbling forward. "And I do mean a _look_." Which meant he'd viewed the last thing the body had seen. "Tay is quite dead…he was walking down a street on the other side of the city, there was a momentary scuffle that left Tay on the ground and dying, the last thing he saw before our hunt resolved was your face. Mind explaining how you managed that when we were both in the Shadow at the time of his death?"

"That would be what I wanted to talk to you about," I answered quietly, attempting to mask my nerves in the same tone David had been using. "There's been an Abyssal incursion as a direct result of that spell I performed from that grimoire you handed me on the other side. It required an Adept of Spirit, and I'm only a Disciple." I held my breath as David digested that, then nodded his head at me to go on. "The result was a Paradox, but the spell went off without havoc, bedlam or branding." My first personal experience with Paradox had been the branding in the car that gave my eyes their temporary firefly-quality. "This caused a manifestation. I've actually spoken with it…I used my phone call to try and get in touch with Councilor Ka, but the doppelganger was there instead. When I peered through the cracks at it, it could sense my attention and drove me away."

"Now, do you think you'll be accepting my help?" In a mirror of the situation outside the restaurant a couple days earlier, we strained our neck muscles to their utmost in twisting to look into the back seat. A woman with sable hair pulled into a ponytail and pale, pale skin sat in the middle of the seat, feet crossed on the left side of the drive shaft case. She was dressed like some high-class business woman who felt she could get away with wearing a skirt, rather than slacks.

"Who the fuck are you?" David asked while I checked the car's ward. There was no change…she must've broken in.

"An aid, if you'll have me. Councilor Ka sent me to ensure your success, and it appears I've arrived at a most auspicious time. The renegade has been eliminated, but there is still more to do." She laced her fingers and rested her chin on them, looking at us in turn. "Normally I wouldn't bother involving myself, but you've been engaged in some rather major breaches of the Veil, and my order is tasked with protecting it. The werewolves for instance-"

"-are on our side of the Veil," I interjected. "Different but alike. They aren't ignorant of the secrets the world hides as Sleepers are."

"As it may be, but the determination of the existence of a breach is up to neither you nor I. That isn't why I'm here, however. My function at the moment is to assist in the hunting down and elimination of the manifestation."

"And administer punishment as you see fit pending completion of that task," I snapped, then pointed to the passenger door opposite the sidewalk. "There's the door. Ensure it hits you on the way out."

The Guardian appeared taken aback at my vehement behavior. Evidently she saw nothing wrong with the wanton murder her order is so often accredited with and guilty of.

"Now that's hardly a civilized manner," she began, but again I interrupted, catching out of the corner of my eye David's incredulous expression.

"That's quite civilized coming from me. There is much worse I could do," I hissed.

"Nightfire, a word," David reached past me and opened the door, then more or less pushed me out. He held up an admonishing finger to the Guardian and growled, "No eavesdropping." Then he got out of the car and joined me on the sidewalk, closing my door as he passed it. I felt a tingle as he worked a spell, but there was no visible effect. "What the fuck is wrong with you?" He was standing absolutely still, anger keeping him from making any gestures or even shifting from side to side. "She's offering assistance!"

"She's a Guardian."

"And that makes how you're acting acceptable?"

"And how is what they do acceptable?"

"I'm not condoning their actions, but they do need to do what you or I might consider reprehensible."

I fought the urge to stare at him incredulously. "To what end is 'what needs to be done' allowable? They're answerable only to their own kind, make judgments about peoples' fucking lives based on the flawed reasoning that what we do - what we are - is a secret best kept by killing us off."

"And what of Tay Renee?" David glared at me. "What about us? We were hunting him down to kill him off, so why are we different?"

I didn't have a ready response, but working with a Guardian just went against the grain for me…I could respect their goal, but it had become washed and obscured with the blood of those who fell within the wide streak of those who violated the Veil. Too many could be considered sociopathic killers already, bare steps above their perceptions of those they hunted.

"I thought as much. We're accepting her help."

Rather than reply, I simply got back into the car and ignored the woman's attempt at pleasantries while David walked back around to the other side.

I could see she belonged to an order of monsters…why couldn't he?

-

We stopped over at the Parliament Building early the morning of the next day so I could deliver a hastily handwritten report about our trip and the result. Ulfman was in the midst of a plethora of reports that had cropped up overnight, so I was dismissed immediately rather than questioned.

I was not hesitant about fleeing.

We stopped at all-hours diner on Elgin St. to eat and discuss our plans, though I refused to acknowledge anything the Guardian – Verbena was the name she gave – chose to say. Eventually she'd give up trying to engage me for a few minutes, but then she'd try again. She'd even gone so far as to try physically drawing my attention by grabbing my arm, but I pulled the nettle-trick and she didn't try again.

David sat between us like a beleaguered parent between bickering children, which I suppose was an apt simile for the situation. I knew it was me being the childish one, but something about the Guardian set my teeth on edge. Although I was fairly certain it was her and not her Order – how else could I deal with the Guardians at the Consilium's Meets without drawing blood? – there was little I could do to attain certainty. My first few surreptitious glances through the lens of magesight during the drive yielded little more than the assurance that she was Awakened, probing of Twilight and the Shadow revealed only a normal spiritual landscape, and rigorous testing of my own biochemistry and overall physiology showed signs of slightly higher stress in my cellular structures and hormone levels. I even searched the spatial template for unusual anomalies, but with the exception of a portal to Brazil beside the door – I checked – I found nothing out of the ordinary.

It was frustrating, to say the least. The only benefit to my absurdly paranoid investigation was the discovery of my final key to the vagaries of the Adept-skill Practices of the Life Arcanum. Once I knew it, I'd cursed and cussed for nearly an hour over how obvious it was…but it was the way of such things: the keys for each mage are different – so it couldn't simply be taught by word-of-mouth – and when a mage finds it, it's usually an "Oh my fucking Christ! Why didn't I see that before? Fucking DUH!?" kind of feeling.

The Life Arcanum was like that for me, though I had to claw my way through the laws of Space and Spirit. The latter ones I typically found myself using some new combination of laws that made up a sort of sketch of the Practice in question, and I'd have a moment of "Oh. That's how it works."

It varied from mage to mage, though; some had flashes of inspiration – David – and others simply "knew." Once mage I knew of claimed angels whispered the laws of the Aether into his ears when he was, well…doing stuff best left in private. We didn't talk about him much…

My discovery took place while I was driving, and David waited with a white-knuckled grip on the oh-shit handle until the speedometer dropped forty clicks to the speed limit before suggesting we trade positions.

I didn't argue.

Back to the present I finally gave up any pretense of ignoring Verbena and instead stared at her, glaring with the unveiling power of magesight. Rather than use just the one or another, I switched randomly through the three forms I knew. The sensation was similar to somebody drumming their fingers loudly across a quiet room to anyone else, and it was like flipping through a kaleidoscope to me. I wasn't trying to be annoying, instead trying to keep whatever Verbena was using as camouflage busy matching my 'sight's resonance long enough for me to catch a glimpse of her true nature. It had to be her that bothered me so much, not her Order.

Suddenly, between one spell and the next she no longer existed. My eyes still saw her, but the spells couldn't see her at all. She may as well have been a hallucination I couldn't see.

I couldn't even sense a void, which spoke to skill beyond what I was accustomed to.

"I imagine that now you'll give up your silliness," Verbena commented loftily, to which I returned to my earlier ploy of ignoring her.

David sighed.

Our meal went on in silence for a while, further discussion suspended before the rift between me and Verbena made us lose our appetite entirely.

When we were just finishing with our dishes I heard the door open, and David cocked an appreciative eyebrow in its direction, absently muttering "She's a looker." I turned to give an almost obligatory remark on my own perspective, and my breath caught in my throat.

The young woman standing in the door was about a year and a half my junior, and stood a few inches shy of my six-two height. Her blonde hair was parted down the middle and had been grown midway down her back. She wore an unflattering grey t-shirt, black-and-white plaid button-up and loose jeans, over which she wore a massive red winter jacket.

My stomach sank as I ran through a point-by-point verification of her facial features, but the mere fact that her stormy expression matched her currently indigo irises told me all I needed to know: my sister had come a-calling and may the reaper beware.

That wasn't the biggest surprise, though…that came when she marched up to our table, leaned in close to me with her hands on the edge of the table and hissed, "Brother, just where do you get off replacing yourself with a Prime-phantasm that dissipates within a few hours of its first shift?"

Oh…shit!


	9. Chapter 9

I crouch at the corner of the roof, staring intently into the darkness across the street. I know not what city this is, though by the setup of the streets and the words on the signs I know it to be somewhere in the states. A muggy night, I wipe sweat from my brow with care not to obscure my vision.

My quarry waits, hiding in the shadows of the building beyond. My eyes are enhanced, transformed to those of an owl in order to see clearly, but I need movement to track it.

There!

Stepping back a few paces I launch forward and propel myself across the chasm between buildings, well above any mere mortals below. My body is hardly recognizable as human any longer, so much have I altered it. The changes are temporary, but necessary. I weigh a third what I did, certain organs eliminated and my bones hollowed like a bird's in order to maximize the distance my muscular legs can launch me and to stress the skin flaps stretching between my arms and legs as little as possible. They are held snug against my body with a second ribcage that can be flexed open at will. My ears are a bat's, and like such a mammal I am able to echolocate. Sticky pads and tiny tines on my hands and feet allow me to stick to and climb walls, and my skeletal structure is altered to allow me to flatten myself against a surface with a minimum of effort.

My target has made similar changes, though he has shrunk himself to take advantage of wings from a dragonfly. I already bear the brand of Paradox – magic gone awry – in the metallic sheen my flesh has taken on. My appearance would cause panic in any crowd I should find myself in, and even other mages would feel compelled to attempt sending me back to the Abyss.

"_Have you found him?"_ David asks, speaking through the telepathic network Verbena has created between us. They followed through the portal not long after I passed through, and when we next met up she set up the spell between us, though she was not particularly impressed with my transformation. The changes had been gradual, adding up every time a new situation came into play.

"_Pursuing now,"_ I respond, leaping again, over the roof ledge and onto the next. I can see my prey in night as bright as day to my eyes, assisted with the street lights. _"Heading north on Ninth."_ I touch down on the golden arches of a McDonald's sign and spring off, leaving the sign creaking and swaying slightly. _"Just passed a McD's."_

Off to the left I see a cloud of darkness swirling, sheets of darkness writhing and for brief moments at a time I can see David's face in its center. He is safer than I am, though not by much. It is harder to see inside a shadow than to glimpse the glitter of a street-light off my body.

My double pauses in his flight and throws something my way before heading sharply east. I am still in the air, so there is little I can do but hope to withstand the attack…but there's nothing. When I open my eyes I am no longer moving, instead suspended in midair by nearly invisible strands of thread. Interesting. I adapt by mutating my sweat glands so that instead of saline they excrete biochemical acid, similar to the digestive juices of a pitcher plant. While waiting for my adaptation to work on the web, I extend my senses into the Shadow and implant a command into a local wind spirit, what I might call a djinn or sylph.

_Seek my prey, oh spirit of wind, slow my prey and cause his flight discord. Wind, chase him!_ I command it, setting it loose. I am fortunate…the spell is strong, and the spirit is already interested in the "game." It tears after my double, freeing the web of some of its moorings. I come free when I slam against a building's side, catch hold of the wall and get my feet against it. Using it as a base, I leap at an angle, upward and forward, until I am virtually flying above the buildings.

I return my sweat glands to normal; allow the wind of my passing to lick the remaining acid from my body. It matters not where it lands, for it will denature before touching any solid object.

"_Where did you go?"_ Verbena. _"You landed on the McDonald's sign, then you just vanished."_

"_Got caught in a web. May have been him…may be spirits. You keep reminding me we have the same abilities."_

"_Not entirely…you're a 4__th__-Degree Practitioner of the Arcanum of Life now, and he is still limited to 3__rd__-Degree."_

"_Incorrect. The changes we have been enduring require an Adept's power. As I grow, so does he."_ Wait…I grab a ledge and use the momentum to swing up onto the rooftop. Watching the double continue north, but I see its movements are stilted…puppet-like. _"David? Kill it. It's a marionette. The real one is elsewhere."_

"_With pleasure,"_ my friend nearly purrs, and Verbena remains silent, accepting both my command and my observation. David's wreath of shadows stab toward the double, narrowing to needle-like spears. Dozens of them stab into the fake duplicate's body, pierce through and wrap around until they encase it in an entropic cocoon. They tighten suddenly, and red mist explodes out to coat the area. My duplicate's spell would be eliminated, and though some portion of the blood would still exist, it would be pigeon or squirrel DNA.

No longer a concern.

David descends and swathes himself in robes of absolute darkness, a false garment hiding his light-devouring shadows. In his hand he wields a scythe, and as the bloodlust of the hunt has excited his spirit he looks the part of an aspect of the Reaper, that of the killer.

Verbena is not to be seen, but that is no surprise. She is projecting her mind into Twilight, her comatose body safely ensconced in an empty apartment room, out of the way and protected by wards against scrying. It is a subtle approach, one likely unanticipated by the other.

"_I've followed the commanding link as far as I could,"_ Verbena says, the air next to us shimmering as she creates a scrying window before us to see through. _"Do you recognize this place? He was somewhere around there, but I cannot get a better lock on him than that."_

"_Thank you,"_ David replies, glancing at me. _"Race ya."_

My only response is a quick quirking of what remains of my facial muscles, the rest stripped away to make my head more aerodynamic. I turn southwest, crouch, and push off. The image Verbena has shown us is that of a bird's-eye-view of nine blocks we passed over an hour ago. Beside me David's robe streams away into a pair of enormous wings, a needless cinematic as the shadows hold him in midair without recourse to such paltry concepts as "lift" or "thrust."

The building I am flying toward is coming up too fast, my momentum not enough to clear the ledge. New muscles pull my second ribcage apart, stretching the skin flaps wide. When they catch the air my rate of descent is halved, but I will make the ledge…barely. I land and clawed feet grasp reflexively at the edge before I begin my long-jump run. This time I will have more momentum, and when I make the next jump I easily clear the next building, landing in the center of the second after that.

Traveling like this is faster than the hunting we'd been doing, so we made it to the specified locale within minutes, in time to hear Verbena say, _"He's on the move! South by southwest, heading for the trees. Nightfire, you need to shapeshift. You'll invoke less chance of Disbelief by doing so."_ I didn't bother replying. My argument against it earlier was that I'd never done it, and I could easily screw up with the pressure of needing to do it properly. I needed to practice…that couldn't be done right now.

David and I hightail it after my double, and even despite the situation I can't help but feel a sort of resemblance to Cybersix, or maybe even Spiderman. After all, I'm technically a mutant right now, carrying genetic structures that were never meant to be spliced into a human working in tandem with one another. Then there's the whole jumping from rooftop to rooftop thing…what "normal" human can say they've ever done that? Were it not against protocol – and punishable by soul removal – I could compete in the Olympics and wipe the floor in the long-jump division.

Movement!

I chased after the flicker I saw with barely a thought to the consequences if I was wrong. The building was shorter than most…squat. I glance at the sign, see it's a Mac's.

_Fitting._

My double waits, calmly checking his nails as though looking for flaws. He appears normal, glances up at me as I land. David descends beside me and his shadows mantle up, ready to rain pointy death upon my double.

"_Why isn't it vanishing?"_ Verbena asks, her mental voice carries a tone of tension I haven't before heard from her.

"I am no simple doppelganger," the other me smirks. "I upgrade. If you want to dismiss me permanently, all you have to do is beat me." David takes a step toward the Abyssal entity, which holds up an admonishing finger. "Ah, ah, ah. Only he can combat me. Only he whose semblance I bear. And it must be a fair fight, or I get to respawn." The entity grins, his teeth too sharp.

"_You heard the fucker,"_ I tell the others, deactivating the spells that keep me in this form. My flesh itches as claws recede into fingers and toes, as my hair regrows and skeletal structure reshapes. In under a minute I'm back to my normal form.

"Ready?" My other asks as I step toward him. I merely nod. "Let's g-" He is interrupted when my fist rushes in an uppercut, catching his chin and snaps his head back. Like I would, he uses the momentum to kick me in the jaw, and we each skip back a couple steps. "Fair enough," he smiles, and we rush toward each other. His hands reach to grab, though since I've already stripped away most of my clothing to reduce drag there is little to clutch. He is still fully clothed, a mistake I take advantage of by maneuvering him into a position to drive my knee into his side. The retaliation is his knife carving a deep wound across my abdomen, though not penetrative enough to damage an internal organ. I wrest the blade away from his grasp and plunge it into his side before he kicks me away. We each take breaths, utilizing our healing powers. He pulls the knife out of his side and the wound closes, just as mine seals without a mark save for the blood.

"This is going to take all night," I comment, taking a defensive posture. The entity shrugs, removes his shirt, then turns and runs for the edge of the building. I give chase, but halt and glare as black feathers sprout from my double's flattening arms. Within a few seconds he has become a raven, winging off and blending into the darkness. Frustration blinds my better judgment, and I gather both my power and my knowledge of the laws pertaining to the Practice of Patterning, wherein I would take my Pattern and remake it anew. The Imago takes surprisingly little time to build, even less to put into effect. My need forces the spell into reality, my body transforms instantly.

It is an uncomfortable sensation.

I launch myself off the side of the roof, powering my wings. I am now a gyrfalcon, the largest species of falcon. It is night and my new body wants to find a place to roost, but I quash its desire and follow on after my double.

The first thing I notice is my eyesight, very good, very sharp. Depth is gauged with excellent precision, and though the colors are slightly different I can clearly read a street sign seven blocks away. Hearing is excellent as well, better than I would have expected. The falcon's body is designed partially for soaring and partially for speed, making it faster than the average hawk and capable of traveling farther without need of a thermal. It is a raptor evolved for the tundra, and that requires the ability for endurance flying.

I chase my double on, out of the city and over the woods, just barely identifying him in the dim starlight. For a moment I consider switching to an owl-form, but that would take time and concentration I couldn't spare from flying. It is difficult, though I am slowly getting a grasp on the technique. Most of the flying currently being done is by the gyrfalcon's mind, its instincts. I am acting merely the part of coordinator, inciting my body's anger and forcing it to see the double as prey, one it must chase down and eat.

The double drops nearer the trees, and in them I see my next tool. My power reaches out and into the forest, speaking to the plants and their spirits. _Spirit of Gaia, in thy name I summon the flora to smite one unnatural to thine embrace. Land, bind him!_ In one moment the forest is still, silent. In the next it is animate, reaching grasping wooden claws into the sky and toward my prey. They creak and rustle as their arms reach to find the entity, and for a moment he has a problem.

A moment only, until he pulls up and I find my next set of allies. For a second my nimbus uncloaks itself, mirroring the magic I use with ghostly wings spreading above my back. _Boreas, God of the North Wind, reach your chilling touch unto mine enemy, whose existence profanes thy glory. Ice, strike him!_ My call is sent up, up into the atmosphere, and I sense a response. The emotion behind it is unpleasant. The command is heeded, but I soon find that my arrogance has given me a price to pay. A chunk of ice falls from the sky and misses my inches, and as more fall I observe my double is having issues with the sudden, unexpected hail storm. From the Shadow I hear the entity speaking to the spirits, his words just barely audible.

_Sylphs, heed my words and stifle he who would enslave you. In the name of the Djinn I command! Wind, choke him!_

I have a mere fraction of a second to process his words when the burst of air strikes me, a sensation akin to running into a wall. My form is light, however, and without sufficient mass the burst doesn't harm me overmuch. I repair what damage there is and dive beneath a second burst, preparing my power to carry more words into the Shadow.

My double and I trade blows, summoning spirits to attack the other. Lightning flashes and thunder booms, rain obscures amidst the flesh-rending hail. Fires spark and begin to rage, birthing betwixt it and the rain demons of steam. The Shadow becomes increasingly violent, as more and more spirits are stirred from their slumber by the actions of others. Predation increases as tree spirits consume rain spirits and weaker fire spirits, and more bizarre combinations arise. It is the birth of an entire new choir of spirits, although one that will not last. Already I can see others coming to destroy that which we've precipitated.

Tiring, as I am sure the entity is, I descend to land in forest not animated by spell or spirit, setting down amongst trees awkwardly, noting idly that gyrfalcons are not designed to set foot on ground. Rather than return to my original form, I overlay a new spell over the previous, becoming about as heavy as I had been before the first change, but much better adapted to this kind of environment. My change is slower this time, and after a minute a leopard darts amongst the trees. My eyes are well-suited to the darkness, brightening it to the equivalent of an overcast day. My hearing is much better, as well. I can hear a mouse hiding in the underbrush, waiting for me to leave. Were it an intelligent creature I would assume it would be hoping for me to leave.

Regardless, I ignore it as unimportant and stalk away. I take no more than three steps when I hear leaves rustling, and when I look back with pricked-up ears I am astounded to see a mouse head reshaping into a grizzly bear's face. That is all the warning I have, for its paw is already moving, and I am struck in the side. The blow sends me tumbling past several trees, fortunately missing any, but I land in a thorny bush…

It gives me an idea.

I extricate myself, ensuring that I make lots of noise in doing so and that I end up with the bush between me and my double. He cannot help but come after me. Grizzly bears have notoriously bad eyesight, so when my double charges after me and into the bush, he hadn't realized that it was more than a mere bush. The thorns aren't enough to pierce his thick hide, but his coarse, shaggy fur is more than enough to snag. My spell ensures his entrapment, causing the bush to grow and snare the bear, its thorns growing slowly longer until they manage to pierce the creature's hide.

I am about to maneuver into a position to deliver a killing blow…or work at it, when I hear the trumpet of a full-grown and enraged African elephant. The ground trembles as it charges at me with speed unbelievable for its size, and there is little I can do but run…until I lose it in the underbrush. It swings its tusks and trunk around, blaring angrily, but it cannot find a black leopard sneaking around at night.

Abruptly it vanishes, and this time my senses register the magic behind it. An elastic effect, temporarily drawing the creature from its home to this point. Not something I would have done, but the return would not risk Paradox…and it kept the field clear of unnecessary events.

I glance at a tree beside me and lash out with magic combining two effects. The first transforms it into a very large swarm of hornets, and the second binds it to my will.

_Search out my enemy and attack it,_ I silently command the swarm. _Feast upon its flesh. Go!_

The insects take off, streaming past me as the tree's form – which they'd held for a moment after the transformation – melts away. In moments there are only a few stragglers exiting from the ground, where the tree's roots had been prior. I watch them, my satisfaction turning to irritation at the appearance of another spider's web, layers of them, where not even a minute ago there had been clear air. A swarm of spiders, working together as they wouldn't otherwise, acting as a pack, they form a solid, writhing mass that completely blocks light past the walls of webs. They act quickly, consuming my hornets. I suppress a snarl, lest my anger reveal my location.

It may be too late anyway…

"You see?" The other's voice echoes through the forest. "I know what you will do before you do." He is in human form again, or he wouldn't be able to speak words. I pad silently, zigzagging through the darkest patches in my hunt. "Right now you hunt me. Right now I hunt you. When I kill you, nothing will keep me from this world. Nothing will keep me from opening a path. I must thank you, for your knowledge is shared with me. What you know of magic, I know, though you know not all that I know."

A pause. I sight my prey, facing in my general direction, but his eyes are peering at the darkness too far behind me to actually be seeing me. His hands move in gestures, mudras, an indication that he is preparing to channel a spell and is easing the transition. I hurry.

"Though it seems I've picked up your tendency to tangle words."

I ward myself against mystical detection, hiding my life signs. To anyone with the proper spell active, I won't register as "living." If this one is tracking me or attempting to sense me in such a way, I will have counteracted that effect.

Hopefully.

Carefully I sneak up behind my double with an emphasis on the silence and slowness of my movements. Too fast and he will sense the air vibrations. Too loud and he will hear my steps. I know his senses of hearing and touch are much more acute than the average human, because my own senses are as sharp. Our vision took a hit, but corrective surgery not too long ago made up for that.

I lunge when I am close enough to ensure striking, and like a leopard I concentrate on his neck and the severing thereof. The body melts away beneath me, though, and I am left digging gouges into the earth. My anger escapes my self-control and I roar, a pathetic sound compared to a lion or tiger, but formidable nonetheless. I am not so far gone into anger as to forget to escape the area, for surely the other has set up a trap.

Moving quickly, I hightail it out of the clearing, in time to have an elephant drop in the area I had just been. Being an animal not designed to take such shock, it dies almost instantly when its abdomen explodes, showering the trees with blood and gore. It is much like a paint-bomb, but more distasteful.

My double has to be close in order to see me, or I would have sensed the magic much more keenly than just the vague stirring. In the trees! I transform once more, this time as an owl, and launch into the canopy. My silent wings take me from branch to branch, the only sound that of my claws grasping the branches. My eyes scan the trees, the darkness as bright as noon to my sight. Every little motion draws my attention, scanning intensely.

"You know, perhaps we should just do this in our own bodies," the entity's voice comes from the distance, farther than I would have heard in my own body. He either knows I'm an owl, or he does not know where I am. I dart closer. "It would make so much more sense…and be a fuck of a lot fairer. Know what I mean?"

_Yes, I do know, and so long as we have the same powers, anything goes so long as we're only one-on-one. Spirits, trees, weather, if we instigate it, it's only us. I could use David like a puppet and attack you with him and it would be fair. You told me the rules,_ I see my double and come up behind him. He is watching the ground. _And I follow the rules._ Dismissing the spell, I become human again, and with the sudden increase in weight I fall straight down. My arms were already spread, and when I contact they wrap around my double's head. He was precariously balanced on a branch, but my inertia pulls him back, the concentration of force snapping his neck. We land roughly, and I feel several ribs crack, but I waste no time in whipping the entity's head the other way. My stomach churns at the sickening sensation of bones grinding transmitted through his skull, and he stares at me with a grotesque grin.

I sigh, hoping it is over.

Beneath my hands the flesh begins to move, roiling, writhing.

_No, please…no more._

My hands, with a portion of my weight balanced on them, slip through the body as it becomes more like thick pudding. It continues to lose consistency until it is merely a gas. The flesh-colored substance collects in a vaguely humanoid shape, hovering in midair. A crack in reality appears behind the entity, leading to somewhere so absolutely black there exists no light.

_The Abyss…_

The entity transforms, becoming solid, but no longer appearing as it had. It now stands tall, thin and gangly. Its arms are too long, tipped with three-fingered clawed hands, its legs too narrow, possessing an extra joint. Long, narrow wings trail off to either side, similar in proportion to a dragonfly's wings but pointed. A whip-like tail slowly coils and uncoils. Its chest is absurdly pronounced, skin stretched taut but no hint of a ribcage. Its face is triangular, pointed down. Two dark blue eyes without pupil or iris stare at me from mauve flesh, its hint of a mouth widens suddenly to reveal rows of sharp teeth, a circular tunnel whose entire interior surface is toothed.

It speaks words in a language never spoken by any human, but its meaning is clear, spoken to my mind.

"I'll be back."

The creature is drawn through the rift, and it closes, taking the soul-hungry darkness with it. Suddenly the night feels like midday, the previous warmth turned to Sahara-like heat.

I can do little else but collapse, barely able to feel my limbs.

"_It's done."_ I tell the others, forcing myself to regain sensation. I must stand, or at least sit up. My body is not broken…I can push past the exhaustion. I struggle to my feet, but I quickly fall to the ground once again. Each injury I've taken is demanding attention, and all I want to do is sleep. I think I drift off, for between one eye-blink and the next I spy David, kneeling on the ground near me.

"Come on, bud," he extends a hand to me and his shadows wrap around me, lifting me from the ground. We rise, significantly slower than he'd been able to alone. I drift off to slumber, waking only when we pass through the portal Verbena has created for us to return to Ottawa. The past few hours have been exhausting, draining me emotionally, physically, and mystically.

But the job is done. That's all that matters.


End file.
